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…
