Begging: The Question
It's the traveler's painful decision. Should you give money to street kids?

By Lori Robertson
Special to The Washington Post
Sunday, January 14, 2007

When Lauren Ratner spent three months in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, she was overwhelmed by the poverty and the number of people, including children, begging for money in the streets.

"Guilty" is how the 31-year-old D.C. resident describes her feelings at the time. Now working in maternal and child health policy, Ratner was in the country in 2003 for an internship with an international family planning organization. As a foreigner, she attracted plenty of beggars.

"I got so tired and bitter of always being such a target," she says. But on the other hand, "I was incredibly rich in comparison, so why shouldn't I be a target?"

Her response to these mixed emotions was to wake up every morning with a new rule for herself. " 'Today I'm only going to give money to moms with babies,' " she recalls thinking. "Or 'Today I'm only going to give money to disabled people.' Or 'Today I'm only going to give money to kids if they're selling something.' So it varied completely."

Whether to give money -- and how best to give it -- is a dilemma for many travelers who visit developing lands and confront levels of poverty they are unaccustomed to. It can be particularly difficult to watch young street children asking for coins or selling trinkets and photos of themselves to tourists.

Travel didn't create this problem: UNICEF cites some estimates of 100 million street children worldwide, not just in popular destinations. But it is clear that Western tourists, prime targets of cute, poor children, are expected to respond. Should foreigners give them money -- or even food? How can they turn away from a child in need?

Several nonprofit organizations that work with street kids tell travelers to just say no. They point out that giving money can keep a child in a dangerous situation. But they also acknowledge that such advice is impossible to follow in every circumstance.

"Ideally, you should try to find an organization that is working with these kids, so that the money goes further and supports as many kids as it can," says Paul Dimmick, spokesman for EveryChild, a London-based organization that works with vulnerable children in 17 countries. "But sometimes when you're there and you're staring at someone face to face, it's incredibly difficult to just walk away."

Lexie Armao and her husband, Jon, have taken many international vacations, including a recent trip to Southeast Asia. The Armaos are 60-something technical writers from Reston, and they have a policy of not giving money to street children because, Lexie Armao says, "you don't know for sure what the situation is."

They once saw a woman in Turkey using a beautiful little girl as a front, Armao adds, saying she'd rather give to an organization.

But she will buy things from children, a well-meaning act that landed her in an uncomfortable situation in Cambodia. When she bought bracelets from a young girl, a second child got angry. "Another girl followed me and was harassing me that I wouldn't buy from her," she says.

"It's basically like the hard sell," Dimmick says of the aggressive behavior some children exhibit. And it sometimes works. But "you still can't tell where their desperation comes from."

Experts on this subject say that some children may be from poor families in which everyone begs for survival; some left home or don't have one. Some are forced by parents with drug and alcohol addictions to get money, and other kids are ruled by violent gang leaders who demand they collect cash or else.

Dimmick once offered to buy a group of street kids in Bulgaria some food, but they couldn't take it, they told him: Their leader was watching to make sure all money came to him.

It's for those reasons that some say giving cash perpetuates a dangerous situation. "While it is the human thing to react to human suffering that you see, sometimes the immediate response of providing some help may do more harm than good, and we should look more toward institutional solutions," says Julius E. Coles, president of Africare. The D.C.-based charitable organization has worked in more than 30 African countries on social projects.

Coles says that if you have a compulsion to give something, food or school supplies are preferred. "But even there, the kids can turn around and sell it," Coles says. Plus, a tourist might not know what food is appropriate for a child, who may be Muslim or Christian. Items that aren't healthful, such as candy, aren't acceptable for any kids, Coles says.

The desperation of the children, combined with the relative wealth of tourists, has created a situation in which friendly interactions are rare. Shunning kids isn't enjoyable -- and it does little to assuage a desire to help.

Matthew Dawson, a graphic designer in Washington, visited the ruins of Angkor Wat in Cambodia in November 2004 and was deeply affected by the number of young, poor children selling things or asking for dollars. "I gave money to a couple kids when we were with our guide, and he was just horrified," says Dawson, 38.

A swarm of children would gather after seeing that he was handing out cash. But the behavior Dawson adopted because of that was no cure for his conscience. "It was one of the saddest things I've seen, both because of their condition and the way you had to react to that . . . to have to basically just ignore that and push them aside and say no. And after a while, you couldn't just say no, you couldn't say anything. . . . That was just weird, and it felt very inhuman."

Dawson's guide, Soeun Saron, discouraged the tourists from chatting with the kids and made a point of taking them to a workshop where children learned to make traditional crafts to sell.

In an e-mail, Soeun explains that his concern extends beyond stopping a flock of children from forming around his clients. "Firstly, I am full of pity for the starving street children," he writes, adding that sometimes children will buy food with the money tourists give them. But his worry is that these kids will grow up to be beggars. As Soeun says, using a Cambodian proverb: "The bamboo shoot grows up to be bamboo."

Tourists offer a huge economic incentive to skip time in a classroom in favor of life on the streets. Soeun says Cambodian parents may give their children 12 to 24 cents in pocket money for school. By begging, they can sometimes collect $1 to $5 a day, earnings that make the kids feel proud, he says.

All of this well-founded advice, however, doesn't make saying no to a child in need any easier.

In Cusco, Peru, Lucy Bertenshaw is the manager of the South American Explorers' clubhouse. The organization provides travel advice, and Bertenshaw distributes a pamphlet that cautions travelers not to give money to children on the streets. In Cusco, kids sell cigarettes and candy late at night as locals and tourists leave dance clubs. "It's putting them at risk," Bertenshaw says.

But, "it's such a moral dilemma," she says. After 3 1/2 years in Peru, Bertenshaw recently saw a boy doing acrobatic maneuvers with a stick at a stoplight and handed him some change. "I gave him 50 centavos, because he's actually doing something," she says. "But then I'm keeping him there. . . . That's going to encourage him to stay." At the same time, she says, she's not sure he'd get off the streets if she didn't give him money.

Says Bertenshaw: "It is hard to give good advice to people when you yourself find it hard as well."

Lori Robertson is a freelance journalist in Washington.