To give, or not, to the beggars?

They’re mostly kids, disabled people, and old women – it’s hard not to feel like a jerk walking (or driving in AC’ed splendour) past them. But the kids are on the street because their parents or Koranic school masters send them out; do I really want to encourage these people to think doing this is profitable? (I know, tout comprendre c’est tout pardonner, but I do NOT understand.) The disabled – usually blind, or missing limbs, or crippled – I just don’t think that being disabled means that begging is the only thing you can do, and I do see disabled people going to ordinary jobs here, and I suspect that the disabled and older beggars probably have someone behind them (like the Beggarmaster in A Fine Balance) and again, don’t feel the slightest inclination to have my charity finance them. (Almsgiving is one of the pillars of Islamic faith, and en principe, donations could be given to neighbourhood mosques that would then disperse the funds to the needy. I asked once why that wasn’t done here and got laughed at – my [cynical] informant said the mosques would just bouffe the money. Ha – it would be interesting to try to get a grant to expand mosques’ capacity for that sort of thing using Bush’s rhetoric about Faith-Based Organizations.)