A Small but Impactful Gesture

This weekend we witnessed something pretty amazing. My friend Kristen lives right next to a mosque and on Fridays (the Muslim holy day) there are a lot of beggars who wait outside of the mosque hoping to get food and/or money from recent mosque-goers when it lets out. The beggars are mostly all old, very frail looking old women, hunched over in their beautifully colored but dusty cotton saris. Their skin is brown and tough like leather and their faces are lined with wrinkles from a tough life. It is all men who attend the mosque. We watched as a passing man handed a couple of scrunched 100 Taka bills to a few of the ladies. Instead of these few lucky individuals pocketing the money, they distributed it evenly amongst the group of women. Other women brought out smaller bills to make change and everyone got a piece of the pie. This is obviously a tight-knit group who takes care of their own. The women who were handed the money in the first place would not have felt right taking it for themselves while others went without. This simple gesture of giving and putting the group before the individual was beautiful and made us all think hard.