Charity Mary

Day ? of project rebuild. (I stopped counting.)

As anyone who has spent any time in a city center in the UK can tell you, charity fundraisers are everywhere. I've gone through several thought processes concerning them - naive and guilty, avoidance, confronting, and now this:

I will stop and have a friendly chat with them because, hey, they're people too. It must be hard to be thrown rejection all day (in fact she told me they had been pulled from the street for a while because one of them had been attacked, and she had been hit earlier that day). I kindly tell them that I don't appreciate being harassed, guilted, and sometimes followed everyday for money, and won't donate to a charity that raises funds in this way. They're pretty understanding, and we have a nice chat. Sometimes I ask them how they feel about their job and they get to vent a little bit, which seems to make them feel better. And me too.