Peanuts

I feel like I went through the cycle of culture shock really quickly and now I'm already viewing the honking and crowds and trash and smells as rather normal.  The little kids though...  I'm a softy for street kids.  It is so hard to say no to these children or the young women toting babies still nursing.  You have so much and they have so little.

The other day I almost took a kid to eat at McDonalds, but I lost track of him after I went into a store.  He found me in time to get the sandwich I bought for him though (disclaimer: not McDonalds).  

It’s a big dilemma of how to deal with little kids begging for money.  They need money, but you’re not doing them any favors by giving it to them because it just perpetuates the cycle of keeping them out of school to ‘work’ and then condemning them to a life of certain poverty.  India actually passed a law making it illegal to give kids money because there were so many people who “pimp” kids as beggars.  

But I don’t think there’s anything wrong with giving them food.  So I always carry around packets of peanuts with me.  Whenever a kid asks for money, I give them peanuts.  Sometimes they just keep asking for money, sometimes they seem pretty happy.  But either way, they need protein and its something that I know that its something from which they will be the ones to benefit.