I walked down the crowded street, sensing eyes upon me. Not an unfamiliar feeling but it still made me uncomfortable. Small brittle hands clutched at my shoulder, an old man, stooped and thin stands in front of me. His eyes sunken back into his skull, his dully shining skin pulled tight over his sharply protruding bones. His hand was outstretched, his eyes pleaded the familiar plea. The all too familiar plea. The old mans lips moved, trying to find words in my language to communicate the old mans need. I have a moment of cold painful clarity, seeing the man's hunger and desperate need. The old man smiles, thin lips pulled up in a hideous caricature of joy, stumpy straggly teeth, turned black by fluoride poisoning are exposed. Warm rank breath hisses tentatively from between his stained teeth.
I hate that the old man suffers, I hates that in seventh months I will be gone from this Third world country and that the old man will not. I hate the corrupt government and the circumstances that put the old man begging in the streets. Scrounging for a piece of bread. Drinking water that was unsafe and disgusting. I hate the other rich white tourists who buy overpriced handmade jewelry from grinning men who pay their workers less than two dollars a day to make jewelry that sells for fifty dollars a piece. I even hate the old man, for making me feel so bad that I am more privileged than he, not because I've worked harder, but because I was born in the United States and he was born into a country where he could not excel. Where no matter how hard he tried, he couldn't pay for high school, let alone college. Where there were thousands just like, him, wanting work as much as he did and not finding anything.
I hate the old man for begging from me because I'm white. And I hate myself, for walking around him, past him, knowing that my fear of helping him makes him that much more hungry. I have never known the struggles he goes through every day, I have never known how it feels to be afraid of starving to death, of not knowing where to sleep at night. I hate my weakness that lets him suffer, knowing I am part of the reason he is in so much pain. I fear him, because I do not understand him, I do not understand how he can be alive, I do not understand how he can function with his dignity stripped away, being forced to beg from a boy forty years younger than he. Calling him sir and hoping against all his hope that the boy will spare a coin. This is my hate.

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