One Euro

The Athens suburb of Koukaki is pleasant, it’s once working class roughness having long since given way to gentrification. Athens’ middle class might be doing it tough in these times of austerity and near economic collapse, but there’s not a lot of that to be seen here.

That is probably why it attracts the under-employed selling lottery tickets and knick-kancks, and the occasional beggar. Rae and I were sitting outside a small café having lunch in the sunshine when a middle-aged man came by, begging.

The usual response to beggars is to ignore them; if one gave money to every beggar one might quickly be broke. This man was a Muslim, by his clothes and the taqiyah – Islamic cap – he was wearing. He was ignored by the middle class Greek women sitting nearby.

I, too, defaulted to ignoring this man, wondering why a Muslim would be begging in Athens. The man shuffled on, looking dejected, as one might from being brought to begging.

I was processing this and wondering at my growing sense of unease. Greece has fairly strict asylum seeker laws, given the great influx of refugees that have come here in recent years. It has also cut back to almost zero its formal refugee intake, in large part in response to rising political tensions over jobs and its struggling economic circumstances.

There is no financial support for the overwhelming majority of refugees in Greece. In Islam, there is zakat, or obligatory charity, the third of the five pillars of the faith. There is also a wider sense of charity for the poor.

I remembered learning this from my friend Bang (older brother) Nur Djuli, when I was trying to learn about Islam. If one eats when another cannot, he told me, then the food will become stuck in one’s throat. This was a lesson about Islam’s wider sense of charity.

Thinking about this, I reflected on Australia’s refugee policy, its lack of charity and, unlike Greece, its remoteness from the world’s worst trouble spots. Why, this beggar could well have been a refugee from Syria or Iraq, as so many coming to Europe via Greece are.

It seemed, all of a sudden, that it was quite likely that this man, who had now wandered off, was part of the human debris of war. He almost certainly had no income and relied on public charity just to survive. All of a sudden, the food I was eating indeed became stuck in my throat.

I excused myself and went down the street. Given his slow shuffle, the man who had been begging had not gone far. I reached in my pocket and found a coin, one Euro.

Some people might say why give a beggar anything and others, more unfortunately, might say why give a Muslim anything. Others would probably ask: ‘Why not give him more?’ A Euro is not much. It was just what I had in my pocket.

I touched the man gently on the arm and when he looked around and I handed him the coin. He said something by way of thanks.

Through a range of circumstances more usually attributable to good fortune that we often like to admit, some of us live life much more easily than others. Individually and socially, we choose to respond to that good fortune in various ways.

There are wars and other forms of conflict in this world, usually not the making of those forced to flee them. Many are as horrible as have ever been and drive whole populations to seek refuge.

Greece is genuinely struggling with avoiding economic collapse and its more restrictive policies towards refugees are to a large extent understandable. Australia, by comparison, remains almost unimaginably secure and wealthy.

There is a profound meanness in Australia towards people fleeing for their lives. It leaves me wondering how my own country is able to not choke on its own good fortune.