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CHRIS-VINCENT Writes!

THINGS AREN'T ALWAYS AS THEY SEEM – The 'Beggar' Who Changed Ghc 20 For A Vendor 2min After Pleading For Ghc 2 For Food

there's a culture of street begging in Ghana
there’s a culture of street begging in Ghana

It has become increasingly hard to find people willing to give out to beggars anymore. In conversation after conversation, I find people sceptical of giving over their hard earned money to people who might or might not genuinely need the money.
This is because a lot of people have ‘infiltrated’ (if that’s the right word) the activity, concocting all sorts of stories as to why they need money. Sometimes you’ll meet a well dressed person and they would spin you a story of how they are travelling from one place to the other and how they need just a little help to be able to complete the journey.
Most of these are scams, and what they have done is numb people to helping others, even if they are genuinely in need – it’s almost impossible to tell between a scammer and someone genuine – and my little upcoming story is going to illustrate that perfectly.
I, like most Ghanaians, feel reluctant to help people I meet on the roadside asking for money. But it usually depends on the mood I’m in and how the situation unfolds. I remember once being approached by a nice, soft spoken guy who opened with how he knows I’m God fearing and how God put me in his path so he can get the money he needs to reach his destination. I gave him Ghc 5 but knew immediately he left I had been conned.
I didn’t feel that way yesterday at all. I was walking on the Sankara overpass, walking down from the ADB bank end towards the Immigration office. By the roadside, in the shade, I chanced upon a woman selling soaps and detergents and the like, with a 1-2 year old baby girl playing right in front of her.
This woman stopped me and implored me that she hadn’t made any sales since morning and that her daughter was hungry. I took one look at the child and decided I should at least get her something. My wallet was filled with Ghc 20 notes and and the only ‘coins’ I had was a Ghc 1 note and some coins that also totalled Ghc 1. So I gave her the Ghc 2 and continued my journey.
But the day was just about to become more interesting. Just after moving a little farther from the woman (roughly 40-60m), I was passed by a smartly dressed young man hawking bottles of ice kenkey. It has become something of a norm that people hawking be smartly dressed, some even going so far as to sell in suits.
This Ice Kenkey seller was not dressed in a suit but he had on a long sleeved shirt, impeccably tacked into his pair of black trousers with his exectuive footwear. He walked briskly past me and as I was smiling inwardly at his attire, asked if I wanted one of his product. I was so impressed with his industry that I decided to buy one from him.
Coincidentally, he said a bottle was Ghc 2, the amount I had just given out. I gave him a Ghc 20 note for the one bottle I took. He could not get any change for me, so he now had to find someone to break the note into smaller denominations for him so I could get mine and move on.
Just behind us there was a shoe vendor who was obscuring the earlier ‘beggar’ woman’s view from what was happening downwind from her (again, she was just over 40-60m away). The ice kenkey seller went to the shoe vendor for the change to the Ghc 20, but he failed to get some.
Immediately the shoe vendor failed to get him the change, I knew his next and only option would be the woman who had begged for Ghc 2 from me. I surreptitiously watched from my position to see whether she would be able to change the money for him.
Lo and behold, she did. He returned from her with four Ghc 5 notes and gave me my Ghc 18 to move on. This was a woman who had sworn heaven and earth that she had sold nothing on the day and needed my money or her baby would starve.
As I took my change and continued my journey, I thought of the reasons why a lot of Ghanaians have become quite apathetic to giving, despite the overwhelmingly Christian bent of the country. Some people think those begging are simply not willing to try avenues to make money, others see them as scam artists wanting to dupe you out of your hard earned money. Yet many more feel that giving your money to someone is giving them a sort of power over you, perhaps handing them some ammunition they could give to their mallam to ‘spiritually’ whisk away your prosperity.
I subscribe to none of those theories. The last one is simply nonsense. I believe the world is an incredibly hard place and people do all they can to make ends meet. And I also believe some people genuinely need whilst others are scam artists (not paint them all with one brush as scammers.) I would continue to give based on a case by case basis, but I just admired the sequence of events that led to such a remarkable (in my opinion) discovery for me yesterday, I felt I just needed to share.
Was I duped or is there an explanation for why the woman had change for Ghc 20 on her after swearing to me she didn’t?



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