Beggars

There are few things more striking that you’ll find when spending any time in Ethiopia than the sheer amount of people living rough on the streets. Back home we have more than any so-called ‘developed’ society should have, but in Ethiopia beggars are notable not only by their numbers but also by their variety. I have almost certainly seen female or elderly homeless people back in the UK, but I can’t remember where or when – at home they are nearly always men. I think and hope that the reason I don’t see elderly homeless people in the UK is because at a certain stage, social care takes over, and, for the time being, there are refuges for women.

People living on the streets here are male and female, from the cradle to the grave – often literally - there are homeless at every stage of life. Many, mostly boys, live their entire lives on the street. By adolescence many show signs of developing mental illness. I have seen no grown men living on the street here who aren’t severely mentally ill or drug dependent. Most are both.

Skeletally thin, these men seem all but lost. They refuse offers of food. When not chewing chat many wander the streets, their clothes hanging off in raged strips of assorted fabric, not faintly aware of being fully exposed.

A man with grotesquely swollen lips indiscriminately eating rubbish from the gutter, laughing. Another sitting stark naked for hours on end in a skip being picked through by dogs and goats. A skeleton wrapped in dark brown skin and rags lying in the gutter at the bus station as commuters jostle past one another, drifting through their morning routine. These things don’t shock me anymore but they’ll never leave me.

People

The label ‘beggars’ reflects in some measure how they are perceived and treated here in Ethiopia and in the UK. I was once admonished by a friend with words to the effect of “he’s just going to spend it on drink” for giving 50p to a man sitting wrapped in a sleeping bag next to an ATM in Belfast. We were just about to go into a club to spend the money on drink ourselves. The man was right there, well within earshot. I doubt my friend knew - in saying this, I doubt he cared.

We use words in this way when we, consciously or not, want to replace or qualify someone’s personhood – their humanity – into a special or different category. Something deviant, other, or entirely alien, and it’s always pejorative.  Loosely, you can do this by turning the adjective describing the person into the noun representing the human – encompassing the whole of their identity. Think:

A gay man           -              A gay.

Of course, like anything in language, like most things really, no rule holds for all cases. Think:

A Pakistani          -              A Paki*.

To call someone ‘a Pakistani’ is to frame them primarily in terms of their nationality, but it isn’t necessarily pejorative. My friend’s attitude wasn’t an aberration. It’s entirely normal and almost everybody does it. It’s an attitude that reflects this ‘othering’ of a marginalised population of people. You’ll never hear this construction of the identity of someone powerful or successful other than in a light-hearted way,  not even when they are being criticised. I can’t even think of a nickname with the slightest chance of sticking to rich people. There probably are some for powerful women.

My point is that in language and in action they are treated like something other or less than human. The logic would seem to be that ‘they are suffering, therefore they deserve to be marginalised’.

Beggars and choosers

Everybody chooses. It just happens that often the choice is between difficult to distinguish bad options. A homeless person might ‘choose’ this life, in that their choice might be between homelessness and, for example; physical or mental abuse, crime, or any of a long list of awful things 

that they find less preferable to homelessness.

Many of East Africa’s homeless people find themselves in this position because their lives have been ruined by clumsy forms of ‘development’. Enclosing common land and creating enormous arable farms benefits those who come to own the land, which is almost always a very small number of people who become incredibly wealthy. When those people who once lived there try to bring their animals onto land that was once free for them to use, cowherds are beaten, imprisoned, given ludicrous fines they couldn’t possibly pay. In desperation, people come to towns where they might find a job. They rarely can. Landing a job as a security guard in an expat compound is about the best many can hope to achieve. In Ethiopia this usually pays about £30 a month, but very few can land regular work. Most hang around car park areas to blag 20 birr (60p) for an hour’s work watching cars.

Maybe some people end up on the streets because their families rejected them for being drunk, addicted, violent. Maybe a lot of them do. Are you going to assess a human being on the basis of a set of media-filtered assumptions?

*I’ve had people say to me, with a completely straight face, that it’s ok to say ‘Paki’ because you can say an ‘Afghan’ or a ‘Tajik’.