The Emergency, by Lena Winkler

They pull at my legs, tripping me, begging and clinging until my jeans are smudged from their fingers. It is my first time in a developing country. I am unprepared mentally; and terrified by their poverty. I can’t give them money. There are too many of them; smudgy,tattered and viciously exuberant. You hand out a couple of rupees and there are suddenly ten more children to wade through. Their practiced pleas are a blur of poor English. This is their business. They are the beggar children of Calcutta. They have a handler that drops them off in the morning and collects their “earnings” from them in the evening. They are kept filthy and hungry for appeal. And I, a naïve 19 year-old, am a terrible victim. I can’t make sense of the enormity of their need and the insignificance of my abilities to help. It’s oppressive. How can such small, beautiful children oppress you?  I never give any of them anything but whatever food I have in my pockets.

One day while taking shelter behind the greasy windows of a back-packer’s café we were stormed by a mob of them. I had never seen them come into any establishment to approach tourist. They were always waiting to accost us, just outside of the exits. I also had never seen them in such a crazed frenzy of gesturing and screaming. It terrified me. Had one of them been run over by a car?  Was one of them ill, dying, attacked? What the hell was I going to be able to do? My companion admonished me for allowing myself to be dragged down the street by them.

“I am going to let them down.”  “I don’t know how to do anything.”  “I don’t want to look. I can’t look at anymore of this craziness; the starving children, leprosy, mothers pathetically offering their babies!”   Panic and powerlessness ricochet in my head as we rushed down streets past animals and children foraging through garbage heaps. And then we came upon him. In stunned incomprehension I found myself looking upon the spectacle of a balloon seller in the middle of the slums of Calcutta. The swarm of children danced eagerly like typical children of ANYWHERE begging me to buy them the balloons; not food, clothing or shelter, but taut, shiny, beautiful balloons. In a daze I bought all of them and the children immediately scattered into gray shadows, laughing and chattering in unfettered childish delight.