It's mechanical really, both the process by which they flee lands declining rapidly under excessive pressure to produce year after year for ever greater numbers, and the manner in which I typically interact with them. A triage, mental to be sure, of who is useful who is not, and who looks just too well to be genuine for there are indeed scams. Zakat, alms is a duty and one of the more positive religious obligations. Young mothers with very young children, but not children of school age, nor the older women with an air of a pimp or a madam.

A weekly event, with no more feeling than an ATM withdrawal. A weekly illustration of the problems facing the region and this country. A reminder of the fact that while where I live gives the impression of being far wealthier, and is in real terms, the majority of the country is far poorer, and often desperately so. A reminder. A reminder that I easily and indeed regularly spend on a fashionable dinner with the chic here more than half the population makes in a year.

For myself, a reminder of why I am here and why I passionately believe in how important it is to contribute to a growth orientated economy, to build real opportunities.

I might add why I am so utterly contemptuous of the self-indulgent, generally dishonest, idiots against free trade - pimping meaningless inanities like "fair trade."

However one can become too removed from present misery. Future benefits are wonderful (and I am not being entirely sarcastic, investment in the future..... reality means patient investment is the only sustainable means of raising real living standards), but what of current suffering? That requires something more than the market, but not in contradiction to the market.

In general I personally try to be moderately generous, despite having qualms about rewarding begging as unhealthy and breeding clientelism over action. I tend to favor the young mothers with small children who are likely rural refugees -divorced and/or abandoned - from the drought striken southeastern tier. Their dress and features are distinctive (oddly the white and the black populations from this region are equally distinctive in physical type, both may be indigenous from long date). Others? Economic growth remains the healthiest answer, although one wishes for magic wands.

That is a reality, and I have long accused the anti-giobo Left of incoherence and wooley thinking, not to mention weakmindedness in regards to balancing interests.

What prompted this digression? Every Friday I see a girl who provides a gut blow to my sense of comfort in these assumptions, above all regarding near term actions. I accuse myself of a moral cowardice in respect to this girl.

It is hard to describe her, indeed perhaps impossible with mere words. I thought of trying; to convey her ruined face, the bloody scabs that are her eyes, skin that seems to have been burned, although that is clearly not the case. A genetic disease? One should think so, although I suppose it might be something else.

But what would one do? To see her being shooed away from fashionable cafes so that she does not disturb the clientele, disturbs. It also disturbs to think that somewhere someone is sending this girl with the ruined face to beg and worse, the real possibility it is a scam - not her illness to be sure, but where the money goes.

The lesson here? I know not. Perhaps it is a suggestion that if one does foreign aid, that basic health is a good place to focus. Perhaps that that life is as Hobbes described, or perhaps that not all is resolvable to economic growth - although surely a nation richer and with proper systems would do better. Indeed that is clear, the state would do well to exit many endeavors (above all much value destroying regulation) and focus on basic education and health care.

Else, there is no easy way to wash away one's sins, nor systematic sins - although that is what our young anti-globos want to do; magically do so.