On weekends I try to stay away from my computer and cell phone. Most weeks, it’s the only time that I can switch things off and try to focus on relaxing and spending time with my family. This past weekend was no different, except for an insistent caller on Sunday evening.
I’ve ignored calls in the past (on weekends) and this would not have been different, but his persistent rings (five in all) made me pay a bit more attention. It was someone to whom I’ve forwarded some pocket cash in the past in hope of helping just a little bit in his struggle for survival.
But the situation is graver. The number of people struggling financially and getting by with the bare essentials of life has increased. I will not try to quote statistics as there are none, but the news are reporting such cases every day, at the very least, talking about the effects that the economic crisis it’s having on people behavior as well.
Basically, people are being reduced to begging!
P.S. Often when a young person is begging for money is is a symptom of teenage drug abuse.
There are people begging in every country usually in the bigger towns and cities, it is sad to see people in this situation and it reminds the rest of us to count our blessings that we aren’t reduced to begging ourselves.
I see people sitting on the floor in London with an empty coffee cup in hand, people selling The Big Issue which is a magazine sold by homeless people, people playing instruments in the street for money, people walking through the train announcing that they need money for a shelter for that night.
I rarely give as I feel that I will be paying for a drug or alcohol addiction.
I have given in the past and befriended a homeless girl who I feel manipulated me into giving her a couple of hundred pounds which I thought was for food and clothes but was probably to feed her heroin addiction.
I don’t know what the answer is but I would hope that a community would look after its people and help their fellow man out of a temporary bad situation or unemployment but with mental health issues or drug issues it is more complicated.
Thanks for your snap shots of Albanian life, my husband is from Tirana and I enjoy the chance to keep up to date with what is happening there.