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What Happens When a Child Meets a Beggar?
Something interesting, for sure.
Do you look away when you pass homeless people on the street?
Or act busy, pretending in a hurry? Anything to avoid looking them in the eye?
Back in the day, I did all that.
I couldn’t look at their misery. I felt helpless — for not being able to do much for them — and guilty — for being in a much better condition than they were.
Now that I have a child, I can’t avoid beggars anymore. I guess only the childless afford to look away.
For the rest of us, an encounter with the unfortunate raises a lot of questions.
Like today, when my four-year-old started to wave at a beggar and invited him to eat strawberries with us.
An unexpected encounter at a farmers’ market
We came to buy veggies for autumn canning.
Matthew sidetracked us, insisting he was going to die if he wasn’t going to get strawberries for a snack.
So, my husband went with the groceries to our car, in the underground car park. And Matthew and I were sitting on a sidewalk, eating… strawberries.
