Charity

At the street corner she waits for the red light. The cars stop. She knocks on car windows. For some cars, the window comes down and then the hand holds out a coin. It’s the way she looks, tiny like a beautiful little child looking only a bit more than a baby. Something about her eyes that invite sympathy.

She has been in these streets long enough so the drivers become familiar to her. She knows who will give and at what frequency. She recognizes the cars and its drivers. Nobody gives all the time but they give enough. She grew up here. Her family lives in an abandoned room at a building in the street corner. She makes enough to help her family survive.

He drives his own kids to school passing the same street corner at least twice every school day. He keeps coins on the dashboard to give to the little girl begging there. She knocks on the car window and holds up her open palm. She gives him “the look.” Big roundish eyes looking up to him, left hand cupped open, right hand points to her mouth in a mimed charade whose best answer might as well be “food.” The hand goes down and makes a circle around her tummy. She means to say, “hungry.” He gave her a peso the first time around. She went away without saying, “salamat.” In the next instance, he advised her to do so. Nothing wrong with enriching her “technique.”

The next few times, his kids advised him to give food instead. Which was what they started doing. It seemed to make her just as happy. This went on for months until she disappeared entirely from the street corner. A small group of boys took over. And then one late afternoon, they saw her sitting on the sidewalk in school uniform complete with the large schoolbag; upon which she sat writing into her notebook, doing perhaps her homework. She does not beg anymore, at least not for now. And they felt happy for her. They wished they had some way of helping her especially now that she is in school. Most likely, they will end up giving coins to others. Little child-beggars line this long stretch of road, disappearing only from time to time. They presume the government comes by to collect them at odd times.

There must be a better way than charity to care for the poor. The problem with charity is the sort of dependency they breed. Everybody knows this. But it’s hard to say no to a street-corner beggar all the time. At certain times, one cannot help handing the coins away. Just in case it might help, though one is almost certain it won’t. Still the hope.

And at those times of hapless hoping, he thinks always if perhaps all the money lost to corruption in this country can actually educate all of the poor, not just the children who beg in the streets but also their parents. Beyond that, every poor person who ever has to struggle with finding a job, given that all the education they have is not even Grade 3-level. Most hardly even know how to read and write or read a ruler; just so, failing everything else, they can at least become better carpenters. It is not as if they are stupid. In fact, they are obviously quite smart.

We watch them from the short distance of a car window. Perhaps we should wonder if it is not high time we rethink what we mean by “education”? More fundamental to reading, writing, and arithmetic, is the lesson which explains to the poor why they are poor in the first place. And this lesson may as well be taught to everyone; most of all, to those who watch from the more fortunate side of the car window.

The old answers do not work anymore. The poor are not poor because they are lazy. If that were so they would not line up to find whatever work is available. They would not walk the streets under a blazing hot sun if not under the rain just for a single Piso coin. There must be other reasons more true than that. And they would be found in understanding our collective route through time, where all of us have come from, our own peculiar past as a people.

And here perhaps we might see how poverty often begets only more poverty, ignorance, more ignorance. Those of us who were born to better fortune should not take too much pride in ourselves and what we have achieved for ourselves and will achieve still for our own children. If we were any better, we would consider doing a bit more than handing out a few coins past the window. We would seek to answer why we have divided ourselves this way, the thickness of the glass on our car windows being as it is less than only a fourth of an inch thick. Beyond handing out, we could also reach out and finally begin to understand.