Operation MenuPanhandling
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
One night when I went out for a walk in Bucharest, I saw a little girl no more than 6 years old out on the street after 9 o’clock at night. She was holding a picture of Jesus and sitting alone around the street corner by the hotel begging for money.
I know the situation in Romania is dire, but we have people panhandling in all major metropolitans in North America, too. My friend insisted that he would definitely give money to those panhandlers because it is a profession that those people choose. Really?
Many panhandlers we have encountered here in Toronto are homeless drifters who chose to live that way. There is government social assistance available to some extent to help those people, but many of them have decided to opt out and panhandle on the street instead. So, for some of them, it is a life style decision by choice.
For the panhandlers in Romania, it is a complicated situation because the whole country is going through the growing pain of social and economic development ever since the fall of Communism. Some older Romanians are still romanticising with the social stability and the security that the Communist government used to bring to the old country. Right now, the social security is literally non-existent.
However, to give the littler girl money is somewhat indirectly encouraging her parents to put her on the street every night to beg for the sympathy from the passerby. I somehow struggle with the thought of “selling the kid for money”. Anyway, it was very difficult for me to walk by the kids without doing anything to help them. That was a restless night afterwards.
Is panhandling really a profession? What do you think?
8/18/2013 @ 6:34 pm
It is more than a profession, it is an enterprise.
Some years ago Budapest was full of these beggars, they could not even speak Hungarian. The “business” works somehow like this:
Someone goes out to the Rumanian countryside, or to the outskirts of middle sized cities (former industrial centers where whole districts have changed into slums), there he gathers families with children. These businessman take these families to bigger cities, keep them in crowded, hidden houses or flats, transport them every day to frequently visited places, and pick them up in the evening. The biggest part of the income goes to the “businessman”.
I think this is quite different from the Canadian situation, in Eastern Europe these people have no chance to chose, especially those children.
8/19/2013 @ 3:22 am
Ferenc,
I should put your comment in my FB to show my friends. Do you mind?
8/19/2013 @ 3:41 am
Of course it is ok.
Once, as I and my best friend were sitting in an terrace in Budapest, a little gipsy girl walked to us begging. Before the waiter could have sent her away my friend gave her some money; I asked him why he had given it, he knew behind the corner the girl would hand it over to her parents and finally it goes to a criminal. He told me: it does not matter, if a small portion would remain at the girl it worths giving, she has a much worse life than we…