Pictures from the Street: "The Gum Sellers"

I breathed a sigh of relief as I stepped down from the tramway, like a sparrow freed from its cage, and walked up the street alongside the American hospital — but I had hardly gone a step before I froze where I stood, for a boy of about ten cut across my path with his small box, bright with rows of red, yellow, and green "chiclet" gum.

The child did not open his mouth; he made do with a pleading look he aimed at my face, with all the supplication and abjectness of his wretched childhood... The university clock struck, announcing eight in the evening, and I felt anxious for the little one before me — his bedtime drawing near while he wandered homeless on the roads, God alone knowing when and to what den he would return. I looked at the boy with a tenderness he was not used to from passers-by, for they seldom meet his importuning and pleading with anything but a curt rebuff or a loud shout. And how strange, how the little one has fitted himself to people's different tempers! Strange how he has come to meet the rebuff with a contented face, repeating his prayers and his entreaties.

It was no easy thing to draw the boy out and question him about his surroundings and his life. In the end I learned this much: he earns a lira and a half every day, which he hands over to his father, who promptly vanishes into the dark toward a hashish den or a gambling den... And on the morning of the next day the little one returns to his street to greet a new day of his life, twin to the day before it and to all the days to come.

This is a true picture of hundreds of small vagabonds whose childhood grows coarse in the streets and alleys — barefoot, half-naked, growing familiar with abjection and humiliation, killing the best of their days in the biting cold and the scorching heat, far from a decent, comfortable life, far from the schools that should be the sole refuge for children like them — so their feet stumble and slip down into the pits of vice, and they become vagrants by trade... And who knows what mastery they may attain in the future in the arts of pickpocketing, swindling, and crime?!

The duty of every citizen, man and woman, toward these little ones with whom the streets of Beirut are teeming — gum sellers, beggars, and their like — is first not to encourage them or give them alms; then comes positive action and wide-reaching publicity, and the sheltering of these children in homes and in the institutions that concern themselves with them; and above all the call for compulsory schooling — the best of all solutions — which would assure these little ones care and learning and keep them away from the climates of corruption and vice. Every hand stretched out to buy gum from the small peddlers, or to give alms to the beggars among them, is helping to keep them on the streets and to drive them down the road of perdition. It is time we woke, as fathers and mothers, to this national duty, and protected this homeless childhood from the evil company scattered through the alleys, and brought it back to the fold of safety — saving it from downfall and ruin, and saving our society from the woes and crimes such children will drag in their train once their stalks harden and their arms grow strong. And finally, by doing this we give our homeland, in place of a corrupt and corrupting person, a sound and reforming one; in place of a destructive, negative element, a positive and constructive one...