Poverty has always been part of my life. First, in my own family: we were considerably poor, and I spent my entire childhood surrounded by poverty. Over the years, while pastoring a church and training new pastors at seminary, I became involved in relief projects for those who were even poorer than I was.
Fortaleza, my city in Brazil, has one of the nation’s largest populations living on the street. So an important part of our work consisted of trying to provide immediate care to this population. The work was simple: we got together some young people and some ladies from the church or some of my seminary students and we made hot dogs, soup, or chicken with rice, and we distributed it throughout the city’s pockets of poverty. After distributing food, we sat down with those willing to say some prayers and briefly preached the gospel. We then returned home after a few hours—full of joy and a sense of accomplishment.
After years of doing that I realized that our work wasn’t very effective. It was as if all our efforts were a tiny drop of charity melting into a deep ocean of misery. Every time we went back to the streets, the same people were there, unchanged, without any improvement in their living conditions. Strong men, apparently healthy in body and mind, came to take lunchboxes from our hands time after time. My charity was not transforming anyone’s reality.
“Should we still do charity?” I asked myself. “Aren’t these beggars just a bunch of lazy freeloaders? But Jesus said to look with mercy at the socially disadvantaged—how can I reconcile this with what I find are the actual results of my generosity?” Questions like these become frequent. So I started asking a new question: “How could I come to understand the needs of the poor more intimately, to understand in more depth how to be effective in the fight against misery?”
That’s when, on January 2, 2017, I started sleeping on the streets with the homeless three or four days a week, dressed as one of them, eating with them, ordering with them, observing from within their reality who these men and women were and how they understood their existence.
The result of my research is detailed in the book The Beggars’ Mafia: How Charity Can Increase Misery. It’s available only in Portuguese, but I can summarize my thesis in three lessons I learned on the street.
First, our charity has been ineffective and created new forms of financial and human misery. I could see that services aimed at the street population end up being attractive to those whose lives aren’t so difficult. It has been obvious for some time that there are courses, shelters, and jobs available to anyone dirty enough and in the right place. And who takes advantage of this the most? Crooks, street gangsters, people who don’t absolutely have to be living on the street. We are concerned about the growing number of homeless people, yet we end up making life on the streets more and more comfortable—and for the wrong people.
Unfortunately, those who live on the street because of their unsuitability for ordinary life will not take advantage of opportunities given by government actions, while the truly lazy ones who could be productive end up doing well. They fake misery to buy subsidized minor success while those who desperately need help are passed by.
I am convinced that churches, NGOs, and governments are inadvertently great supporters of the mendicant life. While we argue with the beggars to leave this life, we contribute to their survival with such missionary zeal that men and women in difficulty consider the street a great option for escaping common problems.
One boy told me he left his sister’s house because he didn’t like her friends. He had been on the street for three months because of this: “Life had a lot of headaches. Here, I live more peacefully.” Another guy owned a house but preferred to “eat for free in the square and talk to the pals.” Mr. Mandala had a rented house, but he preferred to sleep on the street because the house was hot and the karaoke in the downstairs restaurant was very annoying. Luiz works as a night security guard at one of the downtown stores, but he takes off his uniform and mixes with the beggars for dinner every night. Three times a week, his wife leaves the house to accompany him for meals: “It’s easier than making it,” they insist. These are just a few examples of people I met on the street, who were there by pure and simple choice and preference.
The undisputed fact is that not every homeless person is a castaway, a man clinging to the stumps of charity to survive. There is a community of jesters in the streets, who survive by acting to entertain our moral guilt. They believe that everything is given, everything is by right, and everything belongs to them.
Typically, we criticize government actions that simply distribute resources to homeless people without demanding any productive response. The absence of any expectations of those who benefit from freely given goods and services is an absurdity that allows the parasitic existence of a community of fully functional men. But the problem is not just governmental. In Brazil, the government is the least of the culprits. If he depends on public aid alone, the beggar languishes like a corpse. It’s private initiative that has made the street so attractive. It’s the problem of abundant and unrestrained charity, a charity that does not seek to understand the reality of those it serves, and helps whoever is at hand, be it a sincere sufferer or a cynical actor.
Why would anyone pursue of a job if everything that could be bought with a salary can be found free of charge through unrestricted charity? Social assistance exists because there are poor people, but there are also poor people who only exist because there is such a paternalistic kind of assistance. He who supports the occasional beggar contributes to his way of life, whether it is his intention or not, and is partly responsible for keeping such an individual begging.
Mark has been on the street since he was 15. Today he is 49. When I asked him what he did during the day, he said he slept—all day. “That’s my life; it’s freedom.” It’s strange that many social movements, mainly those on the left, tend to see begging as a misery resulting from contemporary capitalism, not as an exercise of individual freedom. Yet that’s exactly how Mark sees his life. “I sleep when God wants, I wake up when God wants. The wind takes me.” He says he doesn’t want another life: “I like to live without the law, but I don’t mess with anyone.”
That’s why you don’t take a man off the street by telling him he can have a better life. Few things are more shocking than the realization that, if the beggar leaves the street, he is likely to live a life that, for him, is considerably worse than begging. The calculation is simple. Instead of seeking to create an economy that favors the market to the point of improving the quality of life of the poorest, we are returning to the same policies that make it difficult for the weakest workers, while trying to leverage the quality of life of those who do not work. We then arrive at the absurd situation that someone on the lowest scale of the job market has a worse life than someone who decides to sleep on the streets!
The manual worker has real financial incentives to drop everything and live on the street. Those who still cling to their dignity may go hungry just to continue to live in a small house, eat their own food, and send their children to school. Those who give up the pursuit of a dignified life and take to the streets can often find a more rewarding existence than those who try with iron and fire to lead an ordinary life. That’s why if we want to convince a man to get off the street, we need to be instrumental in a long-term effort to get him to regain his sense of dignity at the very least.
The second lesson I learned: the main problem with our charity is that it has been impersonal. We tend to deliver goods and food to poor people without any real relationship with them and end up turning our charity into mere moral entertainment. We feel happier, but we solve few real problems. This doesn’t seem like the most Christian way to engage with those in need.
How to understand who is really in crisis and who is just trying to take advantage of charity? Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert give us excellent tips in When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty without Hurting the Poor … and Yourself. First, we must always act with a rational level of disbelief. Is there a real crisis at hand? If you don’t provide immediate help, will there be serious, negative consequences? Otherwise, relief is not the appropriate intervention, as there is time for the person to act on his own and to be developed into a non-dependent person.
We must also question the extent to which the individual was personally responsible for his or her crisis. Of course, compassion and understanding must always accompany our judgment, especially when we realize the systemic factors that can play a role in poverty, such as unfair labor regulations. Still, it is important to consider the person’s guilt in the situation, because allowing people to feel some of the pain resulting from any irresponsible behavior can be part of the demanding love needed to facilitate lasting poverty alleviation. The aim is not to punish the person for any mistakes or sins committed but to ensure that the appropriate lessons are learned from those mistakes.
We need also to consider the extent to which a person has received help in the past or is receiving help now. As kind and special as your church or NGO is, it may not be the only promoter of emergency kindness to a person or group. The person may be getting emergency assistance from one church or organization after another, sequentially and consistently, and his “just this once” may be the tenth “just this once” he has received recently.
Religious movements are expected to have an ever-present openness to those who show the slightest hint of need, but there are very interesting biblical texts to show how even biblical theology condemns impersonal charity. In 1 Timothy 5, Paul says that there should be a list of widows who are helped by the church, and that those who could be helped by their families or who could help themselves should not be part of this list. Similarly, in 2 Thessalonians 3:10–15, the apostle says that idlers are to be known and avoided. These texts make it clear that we need to know who is in a real crisis and who just wants to take advantage of the charity of others.
When it is time to act charitably, we must use the ordinary and natural resources at our disposal to do what the apostles did by way of the supernatural. For example, interpret the calls for almsgiving as calls not merely for handing out cash but for personal involvement. Establish serious human contact, eye to eye, and take those who are unable to walk by the hand. This kind of personal “miraculous healing” in the homeless’ heart may prove to be the best kind of almsgiving.
For this reason, my third lesson is that our charity has ignored the fact that many street men and women must first be enabled through love to be helped off the street.
It has become fashionable to talk about the multidimensionality of poverty. Misery is no longer linked only to financial issues, but to other human factors that are often lacking in the lives of those in vulnerable situations. They have other miseries that are deeper, more serious, more worrisome, and more urgent than mere lack of money. What keeps men on the street is not mostly financial misery but moral failure.
There are real traumas that lead men to a beggar’s life. Those who say they can’t go home do so because those homes are broken and filled with fights, hurt, and wounded pride. Not everyone can overcome certain tragedies beyond their control. There are pains that for some are surmountable and that threaten to destroy them. Many of these adverse circumstances contribute to someone’s embrace of the begging life.
Soares says he was a military policeman. He is 59 years old and has lived on the street for three years. He talks between sips of cachaça. His wife died of leptospirosis. He didn’t dare to go to the funeral. He says he took his son’s car, accelerated as much as he could, and hit a pole. He spent days in a coma days and required surgeries. He went straight from the hospital to the street because he couldn’t bear to look at his children. He drank and wept and talked between sobs. “Why did God do this to me? Why did God do this to me?” he repeated and drank. “She was so good! She was my first wife. I never wanted another. When the girls come to volunteer, I pay them to leave.” He drinks and cries.
And so not every beggar—especially one who has been a beggar for many years—is characterized by the simple absence of goods. By his own choice, he blackens his soul and becomes a different kind of human being, one who willingly disgraces himself. Moving a man from a state of homelessness into a home does not change the soul’s continued begging. Changing economic circumstances have little power to change the inner man. There is a psychic process that leads to the formation of the personality that tends to be common to beggars within this peculiar social dynamic.
Many of them reject our charity and efforts to take them off the streets because they no longer believe that love can exist, or that if love exists, it is ineffective; or if it exists and is effective, it is not able to overcome its conditions of torment. What we must do is fight to rehabilitate wills and strive to meet the suffering person’s internal human needs through love. Only after a real effort in this direction can we, at some point, really consider our work done.
