Handling Panhandlers

They seem to be everywhere these days. At the pedestrian walkway along Jalan TAR. At Bintang Walk (yes, there too). Sometimes they are bold enough to enter restaurants and eateries and approach diners. They can be men or women; old, middle-aged, young or too young; working alone, in pairs or a mother and child(ren) team. Most of them aren’t local i.e. are foreigners. Well, OK, they don’t look local despite donning the skullcap or scarf [you gotta give them credit for trying though].

So what do you do when you come across them? Do you:
- look the other way?
- fumble through your pocket or bag to look for loose change?
- think, ‘Oh, maybe another day’?
- look through them? Do you even see them at all?
Or do you wonder:
- why and how they got to be in that situation and how they can afford to come all the way to this country only to end up begging for money?
- how on earth did they ever manage to pass through Immigration or how they manage to overstay their visa duration?
- what are the authorities doing about them apart from rounding them up once in a while, haul them to the nearest lock-up only to have them roam the streets again days after their release?

Sometimes I wonder about all these. And sometimes I wonder too what I’d do if I suddenly find myself on the streets with only the clothes on my back. Would I seek this way out too?

Even then, I don’t make it a habit to give money to them. I don’t think it’s right or healthy to encourage them to continue being dependent on others for their subsistence. I don’t condone their approach to seek the easy way out of their predicament. Even the blind can weave baskets and walk from one house to another to sell their products. Or at least sell some tissues or dried snacks or anything. To me, even the blind have more pride to try to do something, to attempt to produce something, to walk all those distance, aided or not, and sell their wares. That speaks volume about their effort and independence.

Maybe I’m just plain ungenerous. Calculative. Scrooge. Stingy. But sometimes you have to be unkind to be kind. Like when you’re at the zoo or on safari, you shouldn’t feed the animals even though that would be a kind gesture because doing so would only mess with their diets and make them dependent on being fed to the extent they may not want or not know how to hunt for food anymore. So in the same way, I don’t believe in contributing to these panhandlers because it would only discourage them from being independent, from seeking proper employment even if it’s temporary, and from pushing themselves out of the poverty trap via other means. Besides, sometimes they are just part of a larger scheme, being recruited to beg and the proceeds will be shared between themselves and the syndicate operator based on some pre-determined ratio.

Maybe I’m just a miser after all. Maybe I’m a cynic. Maybe I tend to distrust certain people. Maybe I’m wrong about them; maybe they are genuinely poor and out of luck. But then again, there’s also the possibility that maybe I’m right about them after all. Wallahualam.