Charity

"Madam," I hear from the pavement, "can you help me?"
I look down. A woman sits on the low bricked wall on the corner of Main and Dane. I smile at her and she hands me a folded-up piece of paper. I wonder why she has written her story on this paper, why she doesn't talk to me. I don't quite know what to do.
"Hello," I start, and keep smiling. I must look like an idiot, standing there, looking down, holding this sweaty piece of paper.

I read it. She is the mother of five children and the sole breadwinner. She needs food, money, clothes, a job, anything really.

"Uhm," I say at last, "so you have five children?"
She nods and answers, "yes."
"How old are they?" I ask. I'm not sure why I ask. It's not like I have a right to know this. If a stranger came up to me and asked me how old my cousins were, I'd give them the stink-eye and suspect them of being missionaries on a divine hunt for a potential convert.
"Different ages," the woman answers me, and she moves her arm up and down in a "this high" gesture.
"Aaah," I say. And I nod. Because nodding is so helpful Jen, so helpful. We chat a little more and then "ok, well," I scrabble around in my bag for a bit and hand over a R10 note, "have a nice day!"

Have a nice day, it's storming outside. I can hear the rain hit the plastic skylight above my desk like bullets from a semi-automatic.

And this is why charity sucks. See, that R10 will not even cover her taxi fare from here to her home in Gugulethu (another piece of information I seduced out of her; her participation incentivized by the potential of a cash reward). Maybe someone else gives her R10, and someone else. Ok and then maybe she can buy a loaf of bread and her kids can be fed this evening, they went to bed hungry last night she told me. That doesn't suck. So maybe charity is ok for her. No, maybe the money is ok for her. But what about the process of asking for the money?

On Monday evening as I arrived home, a man came up to me and said: "I can see you've just come home, and I know it's unfair, but I want to ask you for help."

Unfair? On me? Say whaaat? What's unfair is that you lost your job at Telkom after working there for years. What's unfair is that when you were retrenched some technicality meant you couldn't draw from your UIF. What's UNFAIR is that you are forced to relinquish your role as care-giver and stand in front me, a stranger, and rely on me to feed your children. That's unfair.

Look, I'm not saying that living in a symbiotic relationship with people is a bad thing, that relying on the input of others is wrong. I'm all for reciprocal living. But entering that relationship with no power to dictate the terms of engagement is not ok. So this is really why charity sucks. Because it's a short-term interaction where the playing-field isn't even discussed. If I saw the same man or the same mother every day, maybe it would be different. Maybe. For now, I'll just pay for their stories. Because what the hell else am I supposed to do?

I walk on. My feet slush in mud as I make my way to the office. The sky has been grey for weeks.