Commentary

The professional beggar

By FRANCINE BLACK, Staff Reporter

ALTHOUGH JAMAICA'S ECONOMY is growing at a snail's pace and unemployment continues to increase each day, there is a new career that many of our countrymen are turning to. This grand new, growing career is that of professional begging.

The requirements for this profession are simply and easily learnt. You must be a good actor because you must be able to fool the public that you are really a needy, poor person who just cannot do better.

The more I see these people is the more I am disgusted. Everyday you walk down the street someone is coming up to you, hands outstretched seeking handouts. Those who are trying to be different have added props to the act which include children.

I remember a woman in Mandeville, Manchester, who would stand outside a medical centre every afternoon with a baby in her hand begging for bus fare to go home.

The first time I saw her I was moved to help her and gave her my taxi fare and begged a ride home. However I was not so moved the third, fourth or fifth day I saw her standing outside the health centre still begging bus fare.

There was also a man in Mandeville who used to lie on the sidewalk outside one of the banks shaking as if he were having some epileptic seizure. When taxi drivers, who parked across the road started to deter the unsuspecting members of the public from helping him, he quickly moved to another spot where he believed he could continue to make more money.

Swindlers

What drives these people? They spend their days trying to swindle hard-working Jamaicans out of their earnings and worse of all, they keep using the fact that they are poor as their defence.

Some poor people I know have so much pride that they prefer to do menial jobs such as sweeping streets, or chopping grass before they turn to begging, so I do not get those who use this as their defence.

I am not saying there are not people who genuinely need the money but those who lie and trick people to get money have certainly made the public more skceptical than willing to assist.

I think family and friends of these 'beggars' should encourage them to find another career. They must be made to realise that although they are thinking about themselves, what they are doing is seriously affecting decent, self-respecting Jamaicans and they must stop it!.

E-mail comments to francine.black@lycos.com