Here is what happened that night.
The doorbell rang and to my chagrin, my husband actually answered it. I listened from the second floor while he held a conversation with the person at the gate, and caught him as he re-entered the house in search of some money.
Money for a guy at the gate? No way. That’s a no-no in our house. So he told me that I should go talk to him instead.
I was somewhat surprised to see a well-dressed young man in his twenties. According to his story, he lived just a few streets over and had intervened when his dad hit his mom, resulting in his dad kicking him out of the house with just the clothes on his back. Since it was too late to catch a bus or the subway, he needed six thousand pesos for a taxi ride to his grandmother’s house in a different neighborhood. He vaguely pointed to a couple of kids on the corner and said they could vouch for his story.
What to do? I started off by telling him we had a policy of not giving money. We could give him some food, whatever, just not money. But of course with his current situation, all he needed was money. He even offered to get down on his hands and knees and/or sell me his sneakers!
What bothered me was that although he obviously was not drunk, I could slightly smell alcohol on his breath. The last thing I wanted was to provide funds for him to go out drinking with his buddies! I asked him why, if his dad was hitting his mom, he hadn’t gone to the police station just around the corner to file a report. He assured me that he had, and fumbled through his wallet to find a copy of the report. Unable to locate it, he handed me his identity card instead – as if that would suffice to corroborate his story.
In the end, he simply wore me down. I ended up giving him the equivalent of a few dollars and sending him on his way. I figured that ultimately I was only responsible for my own motives and not his … hopefully he was telling the truth, but I still have my doubts.
And that, my friends, is the answer to the “question of the day!”
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