Amina Blackwood meeks
YU SEE dis begging business now? It is perhaps the fastest growing one in this country. Some months ago I awoke in a Robin Dobru mood. The one which inspired him to write, "Today I shall give the beggar nothing". At the stoplight at Molynes Road and Washington Boulevard a little hand started to make its way through my window. "No", I said, "you are too young for this." The response on his face would have filled volumes. He fumbled to tuck his shirt into his pants and disappeared crossing the road without a backward glance.
I concluded that he was new on the job. A more experienced workman would have moved on to the next car or the next pedestrian until the effort was rewarded. He still had the dignity about being properly presented to the world, had not yet learned not to hear the word "no", and should be rescued before he came to that end.
I think often, with conflicting emotions about that boy and, as storytellers often do, ask myself what was his story? Did some desperate parent send this child out to beg so that the rest of the family could eat? Did he go straight home and with what consequence? Has he found more lucrative grounds elsewhere? Have I seen him and not recognised him because it was his one suit of clothes and they have not turned to dirty rags, his whole appearance unkempt?
Has he recognised me and tried to hide like my little friends from Half-Way Tree Square whom I convinced and helped to register at the YMCA but who returned to the streets in a short time because "my madda still want food yu hear, Miss."
In the daily fight to stay alive what can they learn about long-term goals? Especially when those of us who are concerned with our Christian consciences give so that they will not starve on that day thus confirming to them their state of poverty and their need of our hand-outs. And has it occurred to us that this very charity cultivates poverty and feeds helplessness?
Where do our children get attracted to this begging business and learn that they should try it? Well, there are those of us who beg on behalf of the poor. We get our nicely labelled cans, tags or ribbons, beautifully printed T-shirts and caps and we do business at this or that stoplight. We send our children out with xeroxed forms to seek sponsorship for this or that sports club, or this or that cause at school and sooner or later the poor learn that they could be in the business for themselves.
In some situations of course, our giving also confirms the conman mentality. Help people to achieve excellence at it.
A few weeks ago I was in a meeting at the library.
A man who appeared to be in his late 60s interrupted. He was carrying a hand-written note on an exercise book-leaf about his urgent need for an operation for which KPH needed a down payment. I walked him through a recent experience of receiving special senior citizen's dispensation for someone at the same hospital but he was having none of it. To convince the gullible that his cause was genuine there was also written in ink the names of five other 'persons' who had donated sums in excess of $500 each.
'Mean an wutliss'
Maybe there are people who have that kind of 'sponsorship' to give. So maybe this gentleman was right to have cursed me and classified me with those "Jamaicans who jus mean an wutliss", as he went in search of the next suspect.
Then there is the female security guard at the Bank of Nova Scotia parking lot on East Queen Street. She should be a storyteller. She has never received anything from me but a smile and a good-day, but she keeps on trying. Last week she received a laugh. According to her, someone had stolen the chair on which she sat sometimes, as she really could not stand all day. She was hoping to get "even twenty-twenty dolla" to replace the chair, which, incidentally, was not the first one to have been stolen. The security firm had provided the first. She did not want them to know that it had been stolen so she had replaced it herself.
This time, however, "de cost gone up". She should be a storyteller, anything but guarding the parking lot of the bank.
And finally, there was the young man who, smelling of rum, told me that "dem chop up" his brother and the taxi man refused to take him to the hospital because he had no money for the fare. After much flattery about my dress, he said that he knew I was a kind person who would help to save his brother's life by giving him the taxi fare.
He could not explain, however, why he had left his brother two plazas from the scene of the alleged chopping up and how come there was not one soul there "in a nice dress" kind enough to help save his brother's life.
The only way to shut down this business, its manifestations and implications, is to shut down its social breeding grounds. We must provide opportunities for the young to work themselves out of poverty. We must deliver services and care programmes that eliminate the nightmares of the elderly of 'ending up in de almshouse'. A fate worse than death in Jamaica.
Those of us who work on behalf of the poor must become more aware of how much they depend on us not just to keep them from starving but for modelling business ideas and dignified self-sufficiency which we will all be proud to see them duplicate.
Otherwise the begging business will boom and confirm how poor we all are.
Amina Blackwood Meeks is a communications specialist.
