Giving a Little

I admit it: I suffer from a very severe case of middle-class guilt. It pains me as I look out from my South Jakarta apartment (not such a grand one, mind you) to the slum area a stone’s throw away, where some of the city’s poorest citizens scrape by on the garbage that I choose to throw away.

Of course, it’s a complicated and conflicted ailment: I still can justify enjoying my own special creature comforts in life – the luxury of good books and good food, and taking care of number one – and choose not to think too much about the sizable amount of money I plunk down daily for several barista-perfect cups of coffee.

But I like to think I’m doing my part to help out others. With no children of my own, I sponsor the educations of two students from low-income families in Jakarta and plan to add more to the roster. I diligently collect plastic bottles and other recyclables which I give once a week to our local trash pickers. When we do our weekly shop, my partner and I also buy additional meat and necessities to give to passing trash pickers or the homeless.

When eating alone at a restaurant, I’ll order another meal for takeaway. If on the way home I happen to meet someone who needs that meal more than me, then I give it to them.

I know what some of you are thinking: Does this self-styled Lord Bountiful really feel he is making a difference with his little acts of charity? Doesn’t he get that he is the middle-class contemporary equivalent of ill-fated Marie, except this time around he is handing out rice packages to street children instead of telling them to eat cake?

In my defense, I must say that those are things that I’ve thought of myself, and yes, I know the truth of the adage that it’s better to teach a man to fish than to give him the fish battered and fried and ready to eat. But in my own small way, I believe I am making a difference.

I haven’t always been this way. In the self-absorption of youth, when I truly believed I was the center of my own precious world, I never noticed those around us eking out an existence. Sure, I remember earnest conversations about whether the appropriate term for pemulung in English should be scavenger or trash picker (the former sounded too harshly Dickensonian to me, the latter almost too prosaic), but I didn’t do much soul-searching or questioning about their place in society, or my own.

My perspective changed gradually, with getting older and the inevitability of being confronted by the sight, day in, day out, of people struggling to keep their heads above water. I began to give, although there were others who would do their best to warn me against being taken in.

“You know she was profiled in a newspaper the other day and she says she earns about Rp 16,000 a day,” said one acquaintance reprovingly as we passed a young woman who would sit under a bridge cheerfully begging for handouts from passing vehicles.

“She’s probably part of a syndicate. They drop them off every morning and pick them up at night.”

I gingerly returned a couple of coins to my pocket, put in my place. Now, a few years later, older and wiser and able to form opinions for myself, I wish I had replied to my reproving companion, “Well, good for her. She’s got one leg for heaven’s sake.”

Now, I give and give a lot. It’s a basic tenet of all faiths – to give is always greater than to receive – and I live by that belief. Although I do not earn a princely sum or live a luxurious lifestyle, I have enough to live on (my life is cluttered with too many things used once and then forgotten).

Giving is also something I saw in my family. My mother, who grew up poor before education and marriage provided her with upward mobility, was always ready to help those less fortunate she met during her afternoon walks. My partner, who is Muslim and more devout than secular me, supports our now combined efforts and tells me that they will be rewarded in the afterlife. “Giving something to people who have a hard life is good, whoever they are,” he says.

Of course, sometimes I wonder about whether my efforts are just a token drop in our overflowing bucket of structural poverty. To which I answer, every little effort makes a difference. And sometimes I also hear those doubting voices about being a sucker for a hard-luck story.

A few months ago, as I walked out of my apartment complex, I met a young woman carrying a sack in one hand and her baby under one arm. She stopped in front of me and said, “The baby’s sick with diarrhea, can you help?”

I did, giving her some money. Recently, after undergoing my own mid-life epiphany, I met her again. She stopped in front of me, and again said that her baby was sick and could I help.

I did, but this time with an uneasy feeling that perhaps she was playing me for a fool. Again?

“Perhaps she was manipulating you, and perhaps she wasn’t, you’ll never know what her situation really is,” said one friend. “But for some people it takes whatever they can do to survive from one day to the next.”

If I meet the woman and her baby again, and she repeats the same story, I will give her what I have. I haven’t lived her life and don’t know what she is going through. I just know that I’m blessed in comparison, and that’s enough.

+ B. Dharma

Back to The top page