IT IS ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE to walk through any place where crowds are likely to congregate, whether it is one of the several malls which now dot our landscape, the environs of Bridgetown or Holetown, without being accosted by someone seeking some kind of donation.
These “donations” vary from help with pampers for an infant to back-to-school supplies to expensive heart surgery.
I am personally very wary when approached by these “solicitors” and my instinctive reaction is to keep my money in my pocket. Their attitudes are also as varied as the range of their requests, from the very polite to the openly abrasive.
Whilst I am quite certain that on occasion I have refused assistance to a worthy cause, I am more concerned about the sheer abundance of these “solicitors”. Very seldom do I buy the argument that their actions are the result of poverty, especially since many of them seem to have made it a profession, reminiscent of Mr Neville St Clair in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s tale of The Man With The Twisted Lip.
These “solicitors” are not, however, confined to the impecunious or fraudulent, for many present sheets for sponsored walks or cards to be punched, which have affixed to them the rubber stamps of schools, churches, clubs or other apparently bona fide organisations.
I have never been approached by anyone who has offered to provide any kind of service for my contribution unless it was a car wash or cake sale. It is always a matter of “I give and you take”.
I have no problem with contributing to car washes or cake sales, but I do have difficulty with an openly mendicant approach. It seems as though the ideal of honest work has been spurned by these new entrepreneurs who do not understand why they should work when it is so much easier to beg.
In my youthful days as a scout, we used to look forward to “Bob-a-Job Week” when we raised funds for our scout troops by roaming the length and breadth of Barbados performing all kinds of odd jobs for a “bob”, the colloquial name for a shilling.
What is disconcerting about these sponsored walk sheets and cards is that they are usually presented by young children who cannot make the “walk” indicated on the sheet, and if they are presented by adults, these have no inclination or intention to walk. They are in short encouraging these youngsters to take money by false pretences.
Whilst I understand the need for charity and that the poor are always with us, I believe that most of these itinerant beggars are simply rogues who are seeking to earn a living without doing an honest day’s work.
The organisations which provide the sponsored walk sheets and punch cards to the youngsters would be better advised to encourage them to go into the communities and earn the required funds, rather than merely begging alms.
I am no psychologist, but if we teach our children from the cradle that it is acceptable to “get by” without putting in the honest effort, we would be doing them and our country a great disservice. The biblical injunction “by the sweat of our brows . . .” would have fallen on stony ground.
– ROLLINS HOWARD
