Lithuania Vs Bulgaria.
Bristol in 1994 might have won a prize for the most beggary town in Europe if such an award had been on offer that year. It was full of grubby, grungy, smelly hippies with dogs on strings. Reading in Berkshire has its denizens too. There's a black guy there, a Rasta man who dresses in black, who often asks if he can borrow a £1. One day I'll ask him to give mine back. I never lent him one but perhaps he'll be fooled. The point is that whilst there are beggars all over the place they're not all the same. Different towns and cities have different types of beggars and some of these are local personalities. Therefore in places as diverse as Lithuania and Bulgaria, there should be a good variety of beggars.
To begin with I'll consider good old Bulgaria; Sofia in particular. Sofia is full of beggars. Broadly speaking these can be divided into two categories. Gypsies (I know its racist) and cripples (now I'm being crippleist).
The Bulgarians are marvellously racist. They haven't the faintest idea that racism is a bad thing and freely bad mouth gypsies whenever the opportunity arises. However the problem with too many people of a certain ethnic group doing something disreputable, i.e. begging, is that they tar all of their kind with same brush. I like to be broad minded; yes really, but I quickly learned to dislike gypsies as the majority of the Gypsies I met bothered me for money rather than doing anything useful. Yet I feel obliged to say that there were several others doing useful work, sweeping the streets and recycling the rubbish that they would collect in their pony drawn carts. Never the less this was not enough to compensate for the irritation caused by those nasty little women and snotty kids that would collect at the bottom of Marie Louisa Boulevard to hassle me on a daily basis.
Ignoring them was not an option. They would run over to you beg and hang on to your arm as you walked. They really did beg too. "Please Mr a few stotinki" they would repeat over and over in whiny pitiful voices. I didn't mind being touched by the prostitutes at the other end of the street, but this lot really made me cringe. (What about Gypsy prostitutes I hear you cry?) I had enough sense to keep my cash safe because you never know where they might try to slip their grubby little fingers.
Children were pressed into service very early. Rather than going to school so that they might possibly turn into derivative traders or post men they learned to be annoying little scroungers instead; hardly fair on the kids. One child, who I guess was being exploited, had his leg in plaster every time I ever saw him, but he always had his begging bowl in front of him. Other kids used to walk up and down Vitosha Boulevard bothering people, especially those sitting outside cafes. They would even come in and bother you inside and occasionally scrap with staff who it appeared had orders to chuck them out if they dared to come in; which they did.
I suppose the cripples are begging because they have no chance of working for a living and I doubt there's much of a welfare system in Bulgaria. Perhaps begging is more lucrative than working. Certainly individuals seemed to have acquired rights to locate themselves in certain parts of the city. A big burly man with no legs sits in his wheelchair at a specific spot on Vitosha Boulevard almost on a daily basis, whilst around the corner on Salounska a weedy little man also in a wheelchair, would take up his regular post. I used to give the big bloke a wide berth. He looked mean and I guessed he could probably crush bones with his bare hands should he feel inclined to do so. It amused me that whilst they were collecting cash they were spending most of it by chain smoking and at the same time perhaps making saving for a pension unnecessary.
One particularly irritating beggar on the opposite side of Vitosha used to prop himself up on a crutch and lean forward so that when he was holding out his begging box in front of him, he could span almost the entire width of the pavement, making him almost impossible to ignore. There was also the disturbing spectacle of a man who couldn't walk, who would crawl down Vitosha on his hands and knees pushing his begging tray in front of him.
Burgas too appeared to have its regulars. A pair of brothers used to work the sea side park. The fit one would wheel his legless brother to a busy spot, lift him out and pop him on the ground for a begging session and take wheel chair off a discreet distance, sit in it himself and smoke a few fags.
There is, allegedly a pretend cripple working here in Vilnius. After a good session he packs up the foldable wheelchair he’s been sitting in and walks home. That’s what I’ve heard. Personally I think it’s very unlikely that anyone would be so devious.
Generally things here in Vilnius are quite different from Sofia. The majority of beggars are old women. There's about half a dozen of them in Vilnius and they generally sit quietly in doorways with a hand out. A few, conversely walk the streets politely asking for money. They seem quite successful particularly with the English teachers I’ve been with. On feast days these same old ladies and a couple of others relocate themselves to the bigger churches to take advantage of the Christian tradition of charity. There is one old lady in particular who has become something of a local celebrity. She looks like a cross between Dickens’s Miss Havisham and the wicked witch of the West. She likes to drape herself in frilly clothes and it appears that she uses a spoon to apply her make up which is both heavy and vibrant. She has an enormous capacity to scare small children and perhaps frightens tourists into handing their money over. I once saw her sitting in one of the street café’s with a friend enjoying a break and a cup of coffee after a couple of hours of hard begging. Allegedly she’s a commuter and is probably doing quite nicely in her chosen profession.
Vilnius's other famous beggar is a Russian. Well, he says he’s a Russian. I’ve had the pleasure of meeting him a number of times. I remember him, but he never seems to remember me. He’s a tall gangly youth with a well developed technique. After a brief introduction in which he confirms that you’re not a local he start his spiel. His English is quite good and his story goes something like this. “I have no home, I live in the bus station, I have no food, no body will help me I’m Russian so the Lithuanians won’t help me, they’re bad people, they don’t like me because I’m Russian, my mother can’t help me, my sister can’t help me”. By this stage he has run out of things to say but that doesn’t stop him.
As you can imagine I wasn’t standing around to listen to this miserable tale, I was walking purposefully away, but he was walking with me. During his recital his voice was slowly becoming desperate but towards the end he adopted an extra desperate tone and recited the whole lot over again and again as necessary and eventually he actually started crying. Whilst listening to all this drivel I had turned off Gedimino Prospektas, the main drag, and was nearly home. Before too long this guy would be bleating away in my kitchen if I didn’t manage to shake him off. Not only did I not want him in my kitchen, I didn’t really want him to know which building I lived in.
At this point I decided upon a cunning plan. I would walk round and round an adjacent building to see how many laps he was prepared to do. This was a complete success. He smelt a rat and stopped abruptly in the middle of the first lap. “You are a bad man.” He said; and walked off. So, whilst he failed to extract any money from me he did give me a reason to re evaluate my whole life. Am I really a bad man? I’m useless I will confess, although not as useless as he is. But bad?
In my final analysis I think there are two winners. Firstly, those gangs of grotty looking Gypsy women and kids that operate in Sofia deserve a prize for being unavoidable, persistent and particularly irritating. Therefore the team prize goes to Bulgaria. However the individual first prize goes to lithuania and specifically to the gangly Russian. I’m not sure what he deserves more, an Oscar for his acting or a punch in the face for being such a pain. I suspect he gets a few of the latter from time to time. It probably goes with the territory.











