Re: Beggars in Pakistan
It is hard to deal with beggars, cause like you said, you just don't know who is legit and who isn't. I remember getting all teary eyed the first time I went two years ago cause I couldn't understand the poverty in Karachi. Coming from Canada where we live in total luxury, it made no sense to me, why are these children begging for money? Why do they have to train a monkey to do tricks in order to earn a living? What on earth are these kids doing out on the streets so late?
My khaloo is a police officer and he goes that most of these beggers are part of a mafia and they give whatever money they get to their 'boss'. I don't know what is true and what is false. I remember one person ask me for British pounds!!! They didn't want rupees that I was giving, the person ended up throwing it on the floor. They wanted more and in a foreign currency :D ! When things like this happen, how do you know who to believe and who not to believe?
Me and my brother were stalked walking in Saddar earlier this year by little girls. You give one person money and out of no where, 50 other kids come running and they started pulling at my arm and kameez begging for money. It really freaked me out cause we were on our own and you know my Urdu isn't that great.
What can we do though? One option is to offer buying them and their families food at which point they will disappear ... haha, my dad did that once and the guy said no (after proclaiming that he needed to buy his family food cause they were starving), so my dad said he would buy them food and the beggar flat out refused. In a way, it has become a profession .... but do these kids/people have any other choice? What are the alternatives if they are recruited into a life of crime from an early age?
It's not just in Pakistan. The same thing happened in Saudi Arabia, particularly Mecca.