Two groups of beggars encountered today walking home from church. The boys are named Mohammed and Ibrahim.
Every day I am faced with the heart wrenching presence of Syrian refugees begging in the streets. The humanitarian crisis here is of a country of 4 million being unable to absorb 2 million refugees without help from the outside world. The president of Lebanon went to Paris last week to beg help from the US and other wealthy nations but the support he got was mostly military, not humanitarian.
Here is my moral agony: people say that these pathetic souls are being controlled by organized gangs who use and abuse them for the money they bring in. I can see that there is certainly a level of exploitation involved here of young children who are either used as props in the laps of women begging or even let loose to beg alone, some at very young ages. Sometimes there is the fig leaf of selling something like Kleenex packets or pens. Then there is an army of boys between 10 and 14 who carry around shoeshine kits, begging for the opportunity to shine your shoes and promising to kiss your feet.
I have been told by good-hearted people not to give money to the beggars because it will only end up in the hands of criminals. Thus, the dilemma. I feel one should never walk by a beggar and avert one’s eyes. I feel one should offer them something, if only to recognize their humanity. But I don’t want to incentivize their further exploitation. While it is very possible that organized crime is exploiting some of the beggars –- that has happened in New York — I haven’t been able to get a handle on how extensive such exploitation might be here.
I spent ten years of my life advocating against the normalization of a slightly different manifestation of poverty and its exploitation by others: prostitution and pornography. In fact, this week the 58th Conference on the Status of Women is meeting at the United Nations in New York. I began advocating at the UN when Eastern Europe was advocating for prostitution to be regarded as a form of labor, therefore taxable by the state, manifesting better employment figures and possibly even a means of denying women social welfare because prostitution is, after all, “sex work”.
I know that no one goes into prostitution willingly. The push comes from poverty, although in the United States this is usually helped along with drugs and violence. However, societies prefer to exculpate themselves from their own structural violence by blaming the women for being morally corrupt, not the rich and powerful whose moral corruption allows the institution to flourish, and not the men who believe paying for sex makes it somehow different from rape, which also extinguishes the soul. Consent is a poor moral barometer in such circumstances and is a far cry from the full development of the human spirit which should be moral standard.
The same hold trues for begging. No one goes into begging by real choice. They might even be begging as a last resort before entering prostitution which here in Lebanon is reportedly booming. Of course there are people around both here and in the States who will try to say that people beg because they are lazy or because it’s more remunerative than an honest job.
A group of beggars I am especially interested are the shoeshine boys because this group doesn’t appear to have poverty pimps compromising their begging. The ones I see around seem to be on their own, sleeping in a small park behind the AUB hospital. Some of them seem to be fairly well educated. I have asked all kinds of people about how to help them get off the streets and into some kind of school. I hope to speak to some people in a youth organization later this week. But I do not hold out much hope – The Daily Star, Lebanon’s English newspaper, wrote of the police busting a group of families who had sent their children into Beirut to beg. The girls were sent to an orphanage whose staff hadn’t been paid in six months.
I have decided to continue giving money to beggars here, although when it’s young children I give them fruit because I think they should be spared this activity somehow. I give more to woman begging without children. I expect there are organized gangs exploiting some of the beggars but I don’t know who they are and I don’t trust the Lebanese television stations, which have spread the stories about the gangs exploiting the beggars, as there is a rich vein of anti-Syrian feeling here to exploit. If some of the beggars are being violently exploited, I hope they will remember that people like me care about them and that they will forgive us for not having the discipline to walk by. Let real humanitarian aid be soon in coming!
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