Spare me a few rand?

GEOFF SIFRIN

If you drive down the busy Barry Hertzog Avenue in Emmarentia in the early morning, you will see homeless people emerging from under the trees in the park alongside the road where they build small fires. If you proceed up the road towards the shopping centre, there’s a good chance you will be approached by a beggar, asking for money.

Will you do what you might have done a couple of months ago? Will you look around in your car or handbag for a few rand? If you will, are you still comfortable touching money, which the COVID-19 specialists tell us is potentially covered in virus?

You might ignore the man and stare straight ahead with pursed lips, as if he didn’t exist, while waiting for the traffic lights to change. Many people have done this for years. If your window is open, the beggar might approach you and appeal directly to your face with a tragic story of need.

There is genuine pity felt for the beggar living from hand to mouth in the lockdown. But are you afraid if he ignores the two-metre rule in his quest for money from you? Are you more afraid if he wears a face mask, or if he doesn’t?

These seem like bizarre questions from a crazy dream, but are real in today’s context. Hopefully, one outcome of this pandemic may be that the serious problems which should have been addressed long ago by the government and others might be tackled more urgently: how to uplift beggars humanely, and not endanger the people they beg from. There are solutions, complicated as they may be.

Thousands of food parcels have been collected by nongovernment organisations for distribution to poor families without work or other means of survival. Within the COVID-19 pandemic, thousands have lost jobs; hunger is rife. Even here though, among the poorest segments of society, the homeless beggar often still falls through the cracks.

He is mostly invisible to the driver on his way to the supermarket. Or he is an irksome reminder that if there are beggars, all is not well in society, and there is work to be done. When there is a downpour in Johannesburg and everyone rushes inside for shelter, the beggar, draped in a dirty black rag remains in the street. He hopes that one driver will have enough sympathy to open their window to the elements and drop a coin or two into his hands. How he survives against the elements is mysterious to most.

The difference now, with the coronavirus, is that his health affects the health of people in cars or those in the streets who ignore him. There are many ways to address poverty, but it needs urgent attention.

But there is also, for the first time, an ironic converse to the situation. What if you, in your luxury sedan, have just returned from overseas, are carrying the virus, and unbeknown to you, you are contagious? As the beggar in the street extends his empty palm to you, together with your couple of rand, you give him something else: a case of COVID-19 to take home to his fellows.

In this topsy-turvy reality, nothing is as it was.