The One-Legged Lady

The one-legged lady has gone. I haven’t seen her at her usual set of traffic lights for almost two weeks. I still keep her money ready as I approach the intersection, but again today I can’t see her familiar silhouette on the footpath as I approach and she’s not resting under the trees on the median strip, as she sometimes does. I’m wondering if she’s ill, or if she’s gone back to her family in a village somewhere with the start of the wet season, and it strikes me that although she’s now so familiar I know nothing about her, not even her name. And that makes me feel a bit sad.

I think of her as Maria, because whenever I give her money – from my car window while stopped at the lights – she blesses me and calls on the Virgin Mother to intercede on my behalf, looking towards heaven and crossing herself. This is no mean feat to perform in a matter of seconds, while balancing on your crutches, still leaving time to move on to the next car before the lights change.

She is probably one of Guatemala City’s most successful beggars. Her weathered brown face is beatific – saintly as well as beautiful. She’s old enough to get an aged pension, if such a thing existed here (the legislation has passed, but has yet to be implemented) and she looks like the world’s kindest grandmother. Each day she’s out there at peak hour, her long hair twisted into a chignon, wearing a neat but faded dress and frilled apron. She swings along cheerfully on her crutches, smiling fully and openly at the car drivers, blessing anyone who gives but never betraying the slightest sign of ill-will to anyone who doesn’t. Clearly it’s her job and she does it so well, and with such dedication and nobility, that I have actually come to look forward to seeing her each day. I put some effort into trying to time it so I have to stop at the red light, and sometimes if I am too far back in the queue for her to reach me, I put my hazard lights on and creep up slowly to give her her pay, before going through the green light. No one behind me has ever tooted their horn or shown impatience at this. She knows my car now and keeps an eye out for me too. Sometimes when it doesn’t work out we just smile and wave… and I give her a bit more money the next time. I’m not a grand benefactor, just someone who contributes to her weekly income on a regular basis.

The one-legged lady has given me cause for reflection about the whole question of begging and giving. I know as well as anyone that giving a few coins to a person who appears to be in need won’t fix the system, and won’t even make that person’s life significantly better. But it might buy their corn tortillas for the day and save them some hunger pains, and it seems harsh to ignore a request like that when I have the means to help. I’m not the only person who does so – the askers would hardly bother if the response rate were negligible. I see many others putting their hands out their car windows, both Guatemalans and foreigners, holding a few coins or a small note. But what I often wonder is – what criteria do I apply to decide which person “deserves’ my money? Do they have to look me in the eye? Must they seem grateful? Do they need to appear kind, or is it OK for the bitterness of their lives to show in their faces? What if they are really hard to look at, like the poor skinny man with horizontal buckteeth, eyes magnified enormously through thick glasses, who moves with a jerky walk? And how do I know someone really is poor and not just faking it?

Guatemala city is not overrun with beggars by any means. They are mainly regulars who have staked out their own intersections at a dozen or so points around the wealthier parts of the city. Most of them go to quite a lot of trouble to scrub up and dress neatly, which seems literally to “pay off” in a culture where personal presentation has a high value. This is the complete opposite of the begging culture I witnessed in Varanasi, India, twenty years ago, where the beggars seemed to try to look as dirty and sick as possible, displaying running sores and withered limbs and, I was told, sometimes faking disabilities until the potential givers had passed. The beggars in India also seemed to congregate in certain thoroughfares where wealthier Indians or tourists had to walk by, so that it was hard to give to one without fear of being mobbed by a hundred grasping hands and high-pitched pleas. I ended up walking past the rows of beggars in India with my eyes averted because the situation was impossible. Here in Guatemala hardly anyone with wealth walks anywhere, due in part to a valid fear of street robbery, and in part to the fact that this is the backyard of the USA and the car reigns supreme. But even if they did walk, few people of means would dare to pass a mob of beggars on the street, for fear of violence. And even if they weren’t in a mob I don’t think the Indian beggars would do very well in Guatemala. They would probably be viewed as having let themselves go.

The majority of beggars here are people who are just too old or too disabled to find work in a country which doesn’t have a welfare safety net, and I think most people who live here understand that they have few options. Even if other members of their family work, the wages are low and it would be hard for them to manage. But if they don’t have family support there is nowhere to turn for long-term assistance.

There are half a dozen major intersections on my daily route where a particular person has staked out a begging beat. Most of the beggars share their intersections with newspaper men, families selling plastic bags of fruit, people draped in bundles of car phone chargers or the latest shipment of junk toys from China, and the ubiquitous vendors of mobile phone cards. But generally there’s no more than one beggar (and one of each type of vendor) per intersection. Each has their sphere of influence.

On avenida las americas there’s a youngish man in a wheelchair, who takes some risks squeezing along beside the cars stopped at the lights to collect, then swinging around to the end of the median strip, as the lights turn green. On my daily return trip there is an old and thin woman in indigenous dress who carries a tiny brown plastic pot for her money, and doesn’t look you in the eye, but seems sad and faraway. An elderly man in a very threadbare short wrap skirt and baggy trousers, the traditional dress of the people near Lake Atitlan, often appears a bit further along, and he looks both weary and humiliated. If I take a slightly different route along sixth avenida I meet the smiling young man with no hands who carries his leather carpenter’s pouch looped over his wrist stumps and wanders amiably between the lanes. He is confident and cheerful and he seems to do pretty well. There used to be another, very old, lady who held one of the busiest intersections in this part of town, near the big roundabout with the monument know as obelisco. She was so tiny and bent that she barely came up to the bottom of the car window and her whole face wrinkled in towards her toothless smiling mouth, but she was strangely loveable and seemed to do well from her regular customers. My friend who had lived in Guatemala long before we came told me the old lady had been there for years – and that in their family they joked about how long it would be before she retired to her beach house on the coast. I like to think she might have done something like that. All I know is she’s not there any more.

I’ve occasionally seen one man in Guatemala City who displays his withered leg by rolling his trousers above the knee, making it evident that he would have trouble finding manual work, but I find him very confronting and I think others do too, as he doesn’t seem to collect much money. And then there’s the pale woman with her little dark-skinned boy, who sometimes tries to sell individual sweets in beaten old wrappers, and sometimes just walks along the row of cars with her hand out in a hopeless gesture. In a society where white skin is privileged, she’s a puzzle. Every day she looks defeated. Perhaps she has fallen in-between the social groups, a woman who looks ladino (the word used here for people of mixed European descent) but has a child who is moreno (dark skinned). I often puzzle as to why I don’t feel the same sympathy for her as for some of the others. Is it just that she seems well and able-bodied enough to get work? Or am I racist? Do I see only indigenous people as the ‘deserving poor’ and have I therefore typecast them all? After all, hardly any of them beg, although most of them are poor. They work hard for miserable pay, grow a little food if they have a village plot, and scrape along. But there are also many poor, landless, ladinos.

I really have only one clear rule, and that is that I don’t give anything to children who beg. There are not many child beggars, and no regulars that I’ve seen in Guatemala City, although the numbers increase during the long annual vacation, but as a means of livelihood for children I prefer to discourage it. It’s so open to exploitation by behind-the-scenes adults, and child beggars are learning too young that they can get money out of rich strangers by being cute. I can only see that leading to a life on the streets and/or in the sex industry. And there is a public school system here, so if the kids are out begging that means they’re not at school, which just perpetuates the cycle of illiteracy, poverty and dependence. Many public schools also provide food to the children, I think mainly through foreign aid projects, as the education system is very poorly resourced and teachers are paid less than most live-in maids.

For the most part, however, my response is pretty irrational and ‘bleeding-heart liberal’. I haven’t been able to work out a better way of dealing with my own feelings at being confronted, daily, by people who have no apparent means of support, other than asking others for money.

One day I encountered a young indigenous woman, standing on the kerb with a baby on her back and a toddler by her side, who looked so sad, and desperate and humiliated by asking, that I quickly gave her enough money to feed them all for a couple of days, just to alleviate her misery. She didn’t look like a city person. I wondered if she’d come here looking for work and what she and her children had suffered, apart from hunger. But her face still haunts me. I wish I’d given her a lot more, even though I know that wouldn’t solve her problems – being a poor, indigenous woman, alone with her children, puts her at the bottom of the heap.

Mariposa Pesada