All they have is now...By: Georgiana

Here I am again, heading back home after a busy day, feeling tired, all the meetings and discussions over the day buzzing in my head, thinking of how to organize tomorrow… and I pass a homeless girl, she said something, she probably begged for a coin, but I, as all the others hurrying along with me, didn’t hear her.

After a few steps I realized she was there and thought “if I would say something and the other would ignore me, I would get angry”, but she did not, nor did she lose hope, hope that somebody will hear her eventually and would stop for one moment.

Others would argue “she should work, not beg”, “she should ask her parents for money not us”… but have you ever thought of one thing, what if you were in her place? Like all of us, she did not choose to be born what she is. Sure she would work, regardless of the fact that she’s still a child, but without an identity card she cannot even be accepted to clean the staircase of a block. And any other job is out of question since she has no education whatsoever and no home where to go at the end of the day for the daily hygiene and fresh clothes.

So I stopped and then went back and gave her a coin, only 50 Bani I gave her, knowing that there’s nothing she could buy with it… and she thanked smiling gratefully. Somebody once told me that she saw a homeless person eating bread with Nutella, concluding “they make a lot of money”… We think we know it all! We like to think all the others are the bad guys… well, there is someone bad in my story, true, but it’s not her, it’s me…

But let me go back a little to the Nutella. Any amount of money that a homeless person has will disappear in a couple of hours because all they have is now. Why Nutella? Because they lack the knowledge of money and mathematics. Why all the money once? One, because another hungry homeless person can steal the money and two, because his thinking is “I'll eat now because I've got food, who knows when I'll eat again?” (hunger driven behavior). On the streets, there’s no tomorrow, tomorrow she might not wake up because of freezing/ of being sick/ of being killed for fun by a bunch of drunk guys.

Tomorrow is for us, the privileged ones, the ones who can think of paying the rent, buying food for the week, calling mom to check how she is, meeting a friend to go shopping, going to work, and, ironically, we have tomorrow also for complaining of everything that we have…

To close, please just give it a thought... And if you’d like to help, to do something, just do it, I don’t need to suggest anything, you probably know much better all the ways that you could help, all the organizations that you could be a volunteer for. One homeless person integrated is a whole generation not condemned to live on the street. I know we can do this and I know that tomorrow will be better for us and for them if we dare to do this now.

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