Compost Studios

Checking the Belgian news, I read that three homeless persons had frozen to death while I was on holiday in Paris.

I thought of my 8-year-old daughter.

While we were in Paris, walking through a fashionable neighborhood near the center of the city, she cried out to me, “Mama! Mama!”

I followed her pointing finger and couldn’t see what she saw. There was an element of panic in her voice that I didn’t understand. Where was the emergency? Finally I spotted the source of her despair.

A homeless man curled into a circle on the floor of a phone booth.

It was bitterly damp and cold. It had snowed the day before. We were chilled even in heavy parkas, scarves, and gloves, but we were heading home to a warm supper and a cup of tea.

This man was going nowhere.

And for the third time in as many days I struggled for words to comfort and enlighten my daughter. I’d had to explain about the man in the Metro wrapping his feet in rags and lining his clothes with discarded newspapers. I’d had to explain to her why there were crude tents and an informal commune under a lavishly decorated bridge over the Seine. I’d had to justify my decision not to toss change to the woman with the begging cup targeting English-speaking tourists on the Champs-Elysees.

Amid my broad explanations on the causes of homelessness and some of the ways we have helped those in need, my daughter saw not our successes but our failures. She didn’t care about our charitable donations or our work in a soup kitchen last summer—she cared about the sight of another human being sleeping on pavement in freezing temperatures.

“Why couldn’t we at least have bought him a hot chocolate? Why couldn’t he have a warm place to sleep?” Back at our apartment, my daughter threw herself down on the bed and wept, all the joy drained out of her holiday. Is it my role as a parent to try to harden her tender heart? Or is it her place as a child to deepen the compassion in mine?

From our American home near Fredericksburg, Virginia, to Baltimore, Maryland, to Washington to New York to Paris to Brussels, the faces and fates of the homeless have challenged our thinking, our politics, our inner peace. They highlight our helplessness to affect real change. They spotlight our confusion over the nature of their problems. They remind us of our failures to make a difference. They make us uneasy or arrogant about our wealth.

And they die on the steps of a church in Brussels.

From city to city, continent to continent, the problem of homelessness is one we can’t escape. We can move across the globe and become “strangers in a strange land,” but the harsher reality is that the homeless are often strangers in their own lands. They are expatriates in their own lives, homeless in every sense.

Yet in my daughter’s eyes, they aren’t strangers at all. They aren’t easy to forget or ignore. Theirs is not a complicated problem. They are simply people in need, and we are people in a position to help.

As we move into the holiday season with its glittering attractions and religious celebrations, let’s seek ways to share the actual and figurative warmth in our lives, to acknowledge without judgment the plight of the “expatriates” on the streets of Belgium and in the towns and cities of our home countries.

The poor will always be with us, but as we travel the world let’s be certain that compassion follows us from place to place as well. Let’s not avert our eyes but choose instead to face our shared humanity, expatriate to expatriate.

First published on Expatica.com