Spare Change

During our ill fated walk on Monday, Thathi and I got to talking about poverty and disparity rates, it's a topic that inevitably always comes up when hobnobbing with the proletarians. Sometimes it's really easy to forget that you're in an underdeveloped country. The vast majority of people live well below the "official" poverty line, which is determined by the amount of calories a person consumes a day. That is a very base way of trying to quantify poverty for various and obvious reasons, it does not take into consideration standards of living or social indicators.

On Monday we headed to Majestic City (<-- mildly humorous video link) for the requisite picking up of supplies. Usually at such an early juncture of the trip we are walking targets for a mugging. Since the exchange rate was really decent on Monday it was decided that all our dollars would be exchanged for rupees. The smallest denomination that either of us had on hand were 1000 rupee notes. Such a large bill doesn't make it conducive to giving handouts to beggars despite what inflation might be like. We hadn't even been in Sri Lanka for more than 48 hours so the poverty and filth are all still very raw to me. At this point I haven't reached such depths of apathy to begrudge a 10 rupee note and conversely wished I had some money to give.

There was a rather pathetic looking fellow in a wheel chair at the foot of the front entrance to the mall. He didn't have any legs, they were gone clear from below the upper thigh and also only stumps for arms. As thathi and I walked past him he asked us for some spare change. We had to keep walking as neither of us had anything to give him. We managed to do everything that we had set out for ourselves at MC and on our way out we saw the beggar again. There was a guy in a red Bata shirt whom I recognised as one of the clerks in the store, he had a 2 litre bottle of cold water and was washing that beggars face, arms and legs. Sri Lanka is not so caste dominated as India is, but that was nevertheless a very uncommon sight, people just don't do those kinds of things. Sometimes you see humanity in the most unexpected places.