Oh and when the boy says the word fifty in Arabic, he doesn’t pronounce it correctly. He says “kamseen” while in Arabic the first letter is not pronounced as a K but a Ø®. It’s not a letter in English but it’s transliterated as “kh”.

It kinda sounds like that noise you make when you choke on a popcorn kernel…

Plus, it isn’t our fault that we were born into societies privledged enough to have the internet access and some free time. If you want to feel guitly about that, then fine – you can feel guilty or do something to alieveate your guilt (like charity work). But don’t spread you guilt onto others. Perpetuating negativity never helps anything.

I’ve been called ‘mother’ by many street kids who are selling or begging. It pulls at the heart strings horribly and it is good at guilt-tripping people into buying/donating. Even when I traveled with my parents as a teenager (like 14 to 17) kids would rush up and call me mother, urging me ‘Mother, please buy.’ and other variations.

Look, look it’s a peacock fan, father. (I don’t know why he says father…) Fifty! Three for fifty! How much? Fifty! It’s a fan, father! Peacock! It’s fifty!

feather (something) lovely, lovely, 50 rupies, 1 euro,…

along those lines…

But… it´s was not italian, it was spanish.

I was in the middle of nowhere visiting a mosque ruin. A bunch of kids like him mobbed me on the way in, trying to sell me chess sets. Every kid was holding a chess set, trying to push it into my hands, etc. There was a gate where you had to pay to get into the mosque, so the kids stopped when I reached the gate. I told them, “Sorry boys – I don’t play chess, I play backgammon,” and walked into the mosque compound and poked around for a few minutes.

I’ll be damned if upon exiting I wasn’t mobbed by the same group of kids – this time every single one of them holding a backgammon set.