The following observations stem from a trip my wife and I took to Europe a few years back. My brother-in-law, the college history professor, had been hired to teach American History in English to a summer class of students in Hyeres on the French Riviera for a month, pre-pandemic, and we were quick to jump at the chance to join them in the 600 year old house they rented in Old Town. It was a fascinating opportunity to experience old European culture from the inside, and prompted the story that you read here.
Beggars in Europe are different from beggars in
America. It’s almost like the Art of
Begging is considered an honored profession over there, while here it is
considered evidence of depravity or personal failings. There, typically, the beggars sit quietly on
the ground with their hands out, saying nothing. Their targets are the pedestrians walking
by. Here they will be standing at intersections
with hand-lettered cardboard signs, seeking funds that are handed out the window
of a vehicle.
Even in Europe, there are differences between the various
types. Coming up out of the underpass
after departing the Eiffel tower, we were confronted by a toothless old woman
sitting on the upper step of the exit.
The crowd comes in spurts as the giant elevators disgorge their streams
of tourists, and, when we came around that last corner, she went into a
practiced routine where she rubbed her ample belly and cried out loudly, “J’ai faime! J’ai faime!”, meaning “I’m
hungry!”
Later, as we crossed the large open lawn of the Champs De
Mars we were accosted by one of several young Roma women who wordlessly handed
us a note written in English explaining that they were lost and in desperate
need of funds and could we help them? I noticed
as I sent them away that there was always a young man in the vicinity,
apparently wandering aimlessly.
When we went to the Sacre Coeur in Montmarte, as we got off
the subway we were accosted by young men from North Africa who would take us by
the hand and quickly braid a leather tie around our wrists in hopes of getting
10 Euros out of us afterwards. The
technique was to ignore our protestations and assume we would not punch them,
which seemed to work, mostly. I had to
speak rather sternly to the young man who made the mistake of picking me, then
I had to go rescue my wife from hers.
In the evening, if you were seated near the edge of a roped-off
outside dining area attached to a bistro, it was not unusual to be approached
by one or two elderly Roma women asking for funds. The waiters would run them off quickly.
But in the South of France, along the Riviera, the beggars
become different again. We rode the TGV
fast rail down from Paris to Marseille, then switched to a local train for the
last leg to Toulon, and from there to Hyeres Les Palmiers, where we were based
on this trip. The name refers to the
Casino that was the center of town, but we were up the hill in the old town.
On the train ride East from Marseille we shared a
compartment with a group of young people, who were all laughing and talking
like any other similar group on a vacation junket. The funny thing was, they were beggars, a
fact that was revealed a couple of days later when we came back to Toulon for
an evening of touring and bistro hopping with my sister and her family. As we walked through town, I saw that exact
same group of young people sitting on the sidewalk in a busy intersection, but
the difference was night and day. On the
train, they were laughing, joking around and having fun. Here they sat in a disconsolate sprawl up
against a building, their eyes downcast and their faces sad and quiet. Their earrings had disappeared along with their
jewelry, and they appeared to be the picture of poverty as the people passing
by dropped an occasional coin or bill in their bowl. It’s a living, I guess.
Of course, those experiences on that trip to Europe are
separated from these days by more than a few years, and world events have no
doubt changed the makeup of beggars all over the world as desperate people
migrate from their homes in search of peace and security. One thing does seem to remain consistent,
though. The people all over the world
who are living in the street, where every day is a scrabble to survive, and
satisfaction is only to be found in a needle or a bottle, those are the ones
who are on the bottom rung of the ladder of life. When times get tough, there are more of them,
and when things improve, they get less visible.
They’re still there, though, and until we find a way to
bring all of them up out of the gutter, everywhere in the world, we will never
be completely able to relax. There is no
wall we could ever build that would keep them out if things got so bad that we
thought it might. And if it ever got to
that point, it would be too late. We
would most probably join them, those of us that survived. :-{)}
