What Happens When a Child Meets a Beggar?

Something interesting, for sure.

Adelina Vasile
7 min readSep 10, 2022
Image by Leroy Skalstad from Pixabay

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.

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Adelina Vasile

Mother, educator, journalist, copywriter. I write about the things I need to learn myself.