I gave some small amount of money (100THB / ~$3.50) to a homeless person here in Thailand yesterday. He was so happy he wept.
The jarring thing was that, only when I stopped to interact with him did I discover that, while he appeared physically healthy and of a working age with all limbs intact, he had an extreme speech impediment which was no doubt largely responsible for his homeless predicament.
That was less than 10 hours ago.
Another time, I went to a homeless shelter in London and met an Iranian man with a PhD and better English than most English people. He said he'd become homeless for economic reasons, the government had never helped him to get a foot in the door for another job, and nobody wanted to employ an older man from what they perceived as a funny country. The guy I went with, an older homeless dude I'd been chatting to now and then, used my presence to smuggle spoons out of the place for heroin.
Where I normally live, in China, a good portion of the homeless are on the street due to the lack of mental and other forms of health care.
Cash-in-hand, truth be told, fixes few of these problems... in every case the problems are generally societal and related to an absence of decent health care and government services, and logical drug laws.
The jarring thing was that, only when I stopped to interact with him did I discover that, while he appeared physically healthy and of a working age with all limbs intact, he had an extreme speech impediment which was no doubt largely responsible for his homeless predicament.
That was less than 10 hours ago.
Another time, I went to a homeless shelter in London and met an Iranian man with a PhD and better English than most English people. He said he'd become homeless for economic reasons, the government had never helped him to get a foot in the door for another job, and nobody wanted to employ an older man from what they perceived as a funny country. The guy I went with, an older homeless dude I'd been chatting to now and then, used my presence to smuggle spoons out of the place for heroin.
Where I normally live, in China, a good portion of the homeless are on the street due to the lack of mental and other forms of health care.
Cash-in-hand, truth be told, fixes few of these problems... in every case the problems are generally societal and related to an absence of decent health care and government services, and logical drug laws.