Sunday 24 July 2016

Beggars With Rights

As we alighted from the taxi, we stood and waited for the driver to give us our change. Just a few minutes walk from the taxi we saw this old freckled looking man who would walk up to anyone asking for help.
He was in a pitiable position, so we thought of helping out (well my friend actually did). We've gone past him already so we went back to ask what he actually wanted, thinking he was looking for transport fare but to our surprise he brought out an asthmatic inhaler and showed us that he needed money to buy one.
Then I remembered having similar incident where a man came to me with the same asthma issue and I parted with a thousand naira hoping I was helping him.

This is just another cheap scam though, because immediately we said we didn't have money for inhaler he started cursing out, telling us how his god is bigger than us and all other crap.
I thought to myself if he has a family, will he be out there looking for who to buy him inhaler at the dead of the night or is this just a way he gets his daily bread, the city is filled with people like this who comes up with different stories just to extort money from people, either they went to visit a brother who is not around or their wife just delivered a set of twins and they needed money to pay the hospital bill or a very special case of a young man who is always going to uniport and needed transport fare.

The point is these beggars in a way have rights, they will tell what they want and the amount of money they hope to get from you.
You can't freely give anymore cause you don't know who is telling the truth about their situation anymore.
Just as we walked out on him I saw him going to another person for his inhaler money and it's past 10.00 pm already just wondering if he would meet his target that night

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