Tonight we held vespers at our apartment. When we came to the end of vespers, Nerlin and Rachel stayed to talk and have refreshments, and we were all enjoying each others company. It was fairly late (9:45 or so), and I glanced out the window and saw a curious thing. A woman came over to the area where there's a dumpster on the street, carefully carrying a bag. In the light of the streetlights I could tell it was full of food. Instead of dumping into the dumpster, she hung it up on a protruding piece of metal a few feet away, looked around to see if she had been observed, and then quietly slipped away. On further reflection I realized that she knew that the poorest people of the city would come out late and would go looking through the dumpster for leftover food. As part of her "zakat" (offering/sharing/generosity) she had intentionally left a container of fresh food for them close enough to the dumpster that they would see it, but far enough away that it wouldn't get contaminated by the trash or eaten by the stray animals of the neighborhood.
This type of generosity is particularly obvious during Ramadan, when people go out of their way to share what they have with those less fortunate. There seems to be a general feeling that it is a duty to provide for the poor, and that if one has been blessed with extra, that extra should be freely offered.
This morning Paul and Aydin went to the neighborhood grocery to get food for breakfast. The shop was closed, but Paul reported that there were several bags full of fresh loaves of bread just hanging on the door to the shop. It seemed to be understood that those who needed bread would know who they were and that the bread had been left for them as a free offering.
A curious thing about this general generosity is that it's not limited to Ramadan and it's not even limited to sharing within one's own species. In most residential and light commercial neighborhoods, one will find several places in each block where someone has set out a plastic container full of water for stray cats and dogs. Somehow these are always kept full, and periodically many of them have a container of extra meat or bread next to them for the animals as well. There seems to be a general expectation among residents that since strays will be hungry and thirsty, it's up to the humans to provide for them. The city's "animal control" policies are very different from anything I've experienced before as well. Stray dogs are picked up, neutered, vaccinated, and tagged, and then set loose again. I assume if a stray appears sick, one of the local citizens will call to have it checked out. All dogs have unique identifying tags, so if one attacks someone it will be picked up and presumably killed, but there is no assumption that any animal should die simply because it is a stray. I have seen a few people kick cats, but for the most part the animals seem to be cared for by the citizenry in general, and people periodically stop to pet them or leave them food. Most people simply walk around an animal blocking the way. It's not unusual to see a cat or dog just sleeping on the sidewalk or in a planter bed, and people generally seem to accept this. There are enough people paid to keep the city clean that waste is cleared frequently enough so it's not a huge problem. It's a curious approach, but since any stray without a tag will be picked up an neutered, the population seems remain much higher than would be sustainable in the US, but is still relatively controlled.
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