I Need Money For My Sick Kid

This statement is made to us on a regular basis. Always by women. When men lie about needing money, they ask for their sick wife. When women lie about needing money, it is for their sick child. Not that needing the money is the lie, but the story they tell that they think will convince you, the merciful yet stupid gringo, to give them the money.

A lady whose never talked to us before nor come to any of our activities recently approached us in Santa Rita. She told me she needed Q200 because her 4 yr old daughter is sick. Here's our conversation

Jimmy: Wow, Q200. Don't you know that the big hospital in San Benito is free?

Lady: Well yes, but you have to pay transportation.

J: Yeah that's right...do you know that it only costs Q5 to get there. So round trip for you and your daughter is Q20 if they charge you for the little girl too.

L: Well yeah, but she has amoebas and the medicine costs Q70.

J: Really? I just had that and the medicine cost me Q25. Why don't you give me the name of the medicine or the prescription from the doctor and I'll pick up the medicine from my guy since it is so much cheaper. I'll bring it to you tomorrow.

L: Ok, I'll go home and get it.

So of course she didn't come back and that confirmed that she didn't really need money for her sick kid, but was using that as an excuse. However the next day her mom flagged me down. She apparently owed somebody Q200 and they couldn't pay it back and yes the little girl was sick but now she's better but it would really be great if I could go ahead and loan them the money so they could pay back the loan.

Why would somebody think that I would loan them money when they just told me that they owe somebody and can't pay it back. Will I have to wait for the next Gringo to arrive so they can pay me back for this lady? To top it off, this person doesn't know me and has never talked to me before.

This is a pretty typical scenario. On the rare occasion you will have somebody who really does need help, and we have helped before by buying medicine or taking people to our private doctor and covering the costs, but you have to be careful to not be tricked. It would be easy in the short-term to just hand everybody a little bit of money, but in the long-term we would lose respect and have a group of people paying lip service to what we teach with the hope of getting another hand-out.