thoughts from a coffee shop
By: Pratya Poosala
Tags: Homeless, Thoughts And Feelings, Thoughts And Ideas, Homelessness, Teens

Today a homeless woman came up to me holding a baby that was crying. My immediate impulse was to give her some money, so I fished out a $5 note from my backpack and handed it to her. She proceeded to make her way around the rest of the coffee shop, stopping at every table to ask them for change. A couple of people pulled some change out of their bag, while others looked away in unease, saying that they didn’t have money on them at the given moment. As I watched her walk outside of the store, I didn’t have the normal urge of satisfaction that one usually feels from helping a person in need.

I felt guilty for not doing more.

I had researched the issue before to determine the best ways to help someone in need, but at the moment itself, I was taken by surprise and could not act on any of those methods. I finally pinpointed the main reason for not going beyond: my fear.

7 year old me would have dragged my parents’ hands upon seeing a homeless person on the road in India, begging them to give the person at least ten rupees. Yet here I was today, possessed by the same thinking that my parents, the media, and the news constantly ingrain in my mind. Negative thoughts flooded into my head, replacing the feelings of raw empathy and emotion that I had felt for the woman a minute ago.

I remembered my dad telling me about a woman who tried helping a homeless person and ended up getting stabbed because the homeless person wanted her entire purse. I remember someone telling me that whenever I saw women in India carrying a baby with a broken finger, often times, she was never the parent of the child, but a kidnapper who did it to gain the sympathy of the crowd. I recalled my uncle’s remark when I told him about my summer program in San Francisco; there were a lot of “homeless black people” in the city, making it dangerous for me to take the train there alone. I was shocked by the racism-induced sentiment of this quote, and he told me that from living in sheltered Cupertino, I just didn’t have enough experience with the real world, for his friend had been held to a gunpoint by a man once.

I never understood his perspective of it, yet here I was in a coffee shop, where the thought of at least buying the child a toy from the Target next door disappeared as quickly as it came, wiped away by less pleasant thoughts of the consequences of a kind action. I had heard enough heart-warming and wholesome stories of people performing a kind act for a homeless person and completely changing their life, yet I had also heard enough stories of people being killed because of it. I hated myself for thinking in that privileged, entitled way, as if my fears for safety were anything compared to what that woman must go through on a daily basis. Was this just a rendition of growing up? Was there actually no safe way to help someone in need?

These are the thoughts that flood into my mind sitting down in a coffee shop, and these are the thoughts that I know will flood right out the next moment I go back to studying, until I meet another homeless person in the same week and feel the same sense of awkwardness again. On an unrelated note — wouldn’t it be nice to have a way to preserve the thoughts and emotions that we feel in a particular time and play it back when we want to evoke the same feelings? But I guess writing it down is the first step.

~Pratya P ❤