By Josh Curtis

The DAW Program arrived in Rabat today, and after my family broke Iftar, we went out for a walk around the neighborhood. As we walked through the busy streets, filled with people, stores, and cars, and after walking through parks, the host father did the unthinkable: he walked over to a beggar by the side of the park and gave him alms. It wasn’t much, but it was also such an instinctual act of justice and compassion that I immediately felt some shame for not doing the same, though I had little change in my pocket to begin with. I was angry; I hadn’t even personally acknowledged the man’s presence and need beyond internal sympathy. Why did it feel so uncomfortable for me to walk over and give just a few dirhams, less than a dollar? Chump change could make the poor man’s day.

I have had similar crises all throughout the program so far, including in Fez. In the Fez medina, I never personally saw anyone in the Ville Nouvelle give alms, while the beggars of my neighborhood in the medina always seemed well-supplied. I convinced myself of the need to donate a few dirhams to those I saw most frequently by the end of our time in Fez, feeling satisfied that I hadn’t “wasted” any resources on “fake beggars.” This very sensation, however, is concerning to me. I have always seen myself as a good citizen who follows up on ideals of helping the needy with action, sometimes in soup kitchens and sometimes donating money to charities. The fact that my primary concern in waiting to give a few dollars worth of charity usually turned out to be “not wasting it” is a cruel inversion of our citizenship studies so far.

In the United States, and especially in New York, a wicked pattern has developed in which citizens are encouraged to ignore the deprived and destitute because “somebody else will take care of them.” That “somebody else” is usually a charity, or perhaps the government. This organization, the theory goes, can make better use of charitable resources than I can, making sure they aren’t spent on drugs or something similarly counterproductive. America is saturated with such organizations and programs. Morocco is bereft of them, but the citizens are more aware of the poor here, and do more despite earning less. America’s wealth of charities is in some ways a curse: rather than build a connection to the poor who live around us, we resolve that someone else can do it better before happily ignoring these other efforts as well. In the US, we frequently think our activism, votes, and charities make our citizenry stronger, and yet it seems we are encouraged to ignore the very needs we claim to fight for. Thus, the beggars seem to beg the question: who is really a good citizen? In my experience, we participants of the much-celebrated American democracy are the most aloof of all. Except maybe for those young Fassi Moroccans trying to emulate us, but that seems no flattery to me.