Travelling almost always involves confronting experiences with abject poverty. As you step out of the pampered cocoons of hotels, restaurants and airline cabins and see destitute people sleeping on streets in all weather and imploring you for money, it is only the most hardened or indifferent whose holiday post-mortems dont wrestle with dilemmas of the right thing to do.
Having just spent a month in France and Spain, Im personally raw from daily encounters with an apparently large increase in beggars, many from the Middle East and Africa. The desire to give some quick relief to a person whose daily existence is wretched is what motivates many of us to scatter a spontaneous or planned amount each day, to buy them food and drink o…
Read the full article at: http://theconversation.com/can-travellers-transform-a-beggars-life-with-a-generous-gift-67055