Beggar on the street of love

It’s fair to say I didn’t know a lot about Bangladesh when I applied for this job. I knew a few hazy details – they had a cricket team, for example, and it was near India? And some taxi drivers in Sydney were from Bangladesh. I knew this for certain because three nights before I got on the plane I was having one last hurrah with my friends Michelle and Jez, and the taxi driver who took me home in the wee hours of the morn was listening to the cricket in Chittagong. We shared a moment. Or at least I had a moment. He was probably quite glad to leave this babbling, slightly slurring, overly emotional girl on the curb.

So those are the things I knew – Bangladesh had a cricket team, was near India, and there was a Bangladeshi taxi driver in Sydney. Overwhelming really.

If I start talking preconceptions though, I had plenty. For one, the India thing. I assumed, incorrectly as it turns out, that Bangla food would be similar to Indian food. It isn’t. I was pretty spot on with the expectation that there would be lots and lots of people, there are. And that there would be lots of beggars. There are. And that I would find it hard to deal with the whole ‘begging thing’. Once again, I was spot on. To quit beating around the bush, the begging thing absolutely sucks.

I’m not going to bother trying to be articulate about it because there’s nothing fancy or warm and fuzzy or intellectual or even interesting about the conditions of a society which forces an entire underclass of people to rely on the generosity of others to survive. The very fact that it has taken me over eight months to even write about is a good indication of how inadequate I feel.

Not a day goes by where I am not approached by someone – a man with his femur (that’s a big bone in your leg) sticking out through the flesh, dull with dried blood; an eight year old girl carrying a naked and malnourished toddler with the kind of bloated belly we’re all familiar with from those old World Vision ads; an old women with cataracts so murky I wonder at how deftly she negotiates the traffic.

I’m cornered in the market by the old lady with the walking stick, followed home to my door by street kids who try to hold my hands or hang off my shoulders, helped across the road (yes, he stops the traffic, for me) by a man with what looks like cerebral palsy to my medically untrained eye.

The only way I’ve found to ‘deal’ with it is to have one policy and stick to it. The idea of trying to value one persons’ wellbeing above another’s is so repugnant to me (though I understand it is an important part of many people’s lives, it’s something I’m just not cut out for) that I’ve had to take a ‘one size fits all’ approach. I just don’t give.



A reminder for me from the Kolkata metro station that things can change

When it comes down to it, I believe that if I give to children, I am helping perpetuate the cycle which keeps them out of school, uneducated, vulnerable to the sex trafficking and prostitution industry, and attractive slaves to gangs a la Slumdog Millionaire who take their cut of the money begging pulls in.

For everyone else, the sick, the disabled, the people shamed from their communities, the ill and the ageing, I leave them to the mercy of the ill-equipped government and NGO services that are too few in number, but who are there, and who specialise in bringing beggars out from the underclass.

At the end of the day I believe whatever small amount I would give will always be inadequate – and would not form part of the bigger solutions required to address the system which fails so many.

Fortunately the organisation I am involved in here is working on the bigger solution bit. This doesn’t make me feel any better when I walk the long way home to avoid the boy with one leg who begs in front of the fruit stalls at the end of my street, but at least it’s something.