Jenyfer Matthews

Think about how much junk mail you might get in a typical week – maybe even in a typical day. If you take the time to open it all, how long does it take you? A couple of minutes? Now imagine how long it would take you to open it all if you only did it once a year like I do.

Ridiculous.

My step-mother dutifully saves every piece of mail that I get at their address and stacks it up for me all year for when I come back in the summer time. You might wonder why she doesn’t recycle some of it before I get here: she’s the Post Mistress. It’s against her sacred duty to discard someone else’s mail.

Most of what I get are catalogs and solicitations for money. Once you make a donation to one charitable organization, you can be sure that they will be back in touch along with at least a dozen more organizations to whom they have sold your information. Even more than the time that it takes me to go through it all, it’s appalling what a waste of resources it is – resources that you would think could be put to better use supporting whatever cause for which they are trying to raise money.

It’s not only the paper and postage they use to send out the requests, it’s the free gifts that they include to try and guilt people into contributing. I do the majority of my correspondence and bill paying online these days – as I suspect many others do as well – so who is using all of the address labels that are sent out? I could never get through all of the labels that even one organization sent me before the next lot started to roll in. I also got two free calendars, six sheets of wrapping paper (Christmas and all occasion), plus a nice stack of note cards. The March of Dimes even sent me an actual dime. How much did they spend sending out actual money? It makes much more sense to me to just tell me what gift will be sent if I contribute – and to give me the option to donate and say “no thanks – keep the gift”. Chances are that if I can afford to donate money, I can also afford to buy an umbrella or a shopping bag and I’d rather the money I send be used for the cause for which it is intended.

The free gifts are not entirely ineffective – I’ll probably make a donation to at least one of the groups that solicited me. But I almost wish I could manage to do it anonymously so that I could avoid getting another big stack of desperate solicitations. I know that my FIL also gets mail for me at his address, but since he has no ties to the post office he has no scruples about recycling it as it arrives!

My son went on a play date over the weekend, during which the hosting parent decided to direct some charitable activities. It’s Ramadan, a month-long Muslim holiday during which they fast in daylight hours, and this parent decided to put together some bags of groceries to distribute to poor families.

My son came home with three bags of groceries to assemble his give-away bags. Each bag ended up having 500g dry lentils, 500g red lentils, a bag of pasta, a 1kg bag of sugar, a package of dried apricot sheets, a 1kg bag of rice, and a small pack of biscuits. We assembled the two bags and my son was very excited about the idea of finding someone to give them to.

There is no shame in begging in Islam. In fact, from my limited understanding of things, it’s part of a Muslim’s religious duty to care for those less fortunate. Part of the reason for fasting during Ramadan is so that they can experience the deprivation that poor people suffer on a daily basis.

There is always a catch of course, this one being strictly cultural. One is that being on foot, I don’t often give money to beggars unless I can make a speedy getaway. I’ve been in situations where you give some money to one person and suddenly ten more come out of the woodwork. A friend of mine said she gave some money to a woman with a baby one day and found herself being followed home by a small posse of beggars. There are so many poor people in Egypt, you could stand on the street corner and give out money steadily until you yourself were impoverished and still there would be more people with their hands out.

The other thing is that I myself feel very awkward about going up to people on the street and offering them charity. I don’t want to make any faulty assumptions about a person’s income level or offend anyone’s pride. I would prefer for someone to approach me, thereby removing all doubt. However, I live in a rather affluent suburb of Cairo so there aren’t so very many beggars on the street here anyway. I know of a couple of families who live in tumble-down shacks on vacant lots, but again I feel strange going up to their door and offering them charity they may or may not want.

I also wonder about how best to include my son in this activity, or whether to include him at all. Surely, it’s not a bad thing for him to know that not everyone is as fortunate in their circumstances as he is and to teach him compassion, but how does including him in the equation change things? Would people be more willing to accept an offering from a well intentioned (and adorable) little boy? Or might they think that I’m using them as some sort of object lesson? I don’t want to humiliate anyone in the process.

It is, of course, entirely possible that I think too much.

Still, I have these two bags to give away so I took one bag with me on Saturday, to look for a likely candidate while we walked to our club to take our children to their tennis lessons (just the contrast in those two very different activities makes me squirm) The bag was ridiculously heavy and of course I did not see anyone who might have really needed such a bag. I did not want to carry it home again so a friend and I took it to a family who lives around the corner from our club, in a vacant lot. They were extremely gracious and seemed pleased enough to have it. I was extremely pleased not to have to carry it home. Win win.

I took the other bag with me when I went out to grocery shop the next morning. Lately there have been a least a couple of ladies who have been begging on my route to the shops, and failing that I figured I would be able to find a street sweeper. Where are the all beggars when you need them? There was no one out either going to or returning from the store. I’d leave it outside a poor family’s house if I didn’t worry that they would be suspicious of who left it there and reject it for that reason. I ended up carrying the damn bag home again where I weighed it (once I got the strength back in my arm). It weighs nine pounds. I feel like I’m doing my own sort of Ramadan penance, just carrying the thing around.

I’ll give it a couple more tries. Surely I can find someone, somewhere who would appreciate it before Ramadan ends…

While you are out and about preparing for the holidays, take some time to think about those less fortunate than you. Even a small gesture can mean a lot at this time of the year.