“Didi.”

There are fingers reaching in my window. I sink down lower in my seat.

“DIDI.”

I really don’t want to deal with this right now.

“Didi, please, I am so hungry, can you give some money?”

With the hand that isn’t hanging on my moving cab for dear life, he motions food in his mouth.

I finally raise my head to look at the (probably) three or four year-old little boy talking to me through my closed window as he walks along beside my cab in the traffic.

“You shouldn’t beg,” I mumble as I pry his little fingers out of my window; he responds by shoving them right back in. My cab driver just looks at me. Embarrassed, both by my unwillingness to roll down the window, and by the situation itself, I ignore them both. The light turns green, the kid gives up and off we go.

Welcome to an average day in the tourist ghetto of Kathmandu, where being accosted by really young children for a “sweet” or a dollar, sick-looking women with small babies asking you to buy them milk (and, so I hear, selling it back to the store right after), is par for the course. And although yes, there’s a lot of poverty in the States, especially right now, there are also laws against panhandling, soup kitchens and homeless shelters. Not to mention that the sheer number of people asking you for money — people who, regardless of whether they’re “faking” or not, need it a hell of a lot more than you do — is so huge that the only way to not fall victim to depression is to turn a blind eye.

In honor of midterms, here’s a moral dilemma multiple choice for you (Why, you’re right! I did steal this gimmick from Slumdog!): A little kid on the street, tiny, covered in dirt, with the clothes hanging off of him asks you to spare them a biscuit or some change. Surrounding him are about twenty other kids doing the same, a few adult women with babies, and some old, high-on-life-and-other-substances sagus. Do you:

A) Give the kid some money and then ignore the rest.

B) Go around doling some change to the whole group in your vicinity like some great foreign (white) benefactor.

C) Ignore the kid.

D) Give the kid food instead of money so he won’t spend it on sniffing glue?

Do you have the answer? I sure as hell don’t.

I can tell you I’ve done everything but option B, which I’m not telling you so you can talk about what an awesome person I am, because in my opinion, talking about your own personal charity is toolish. If you’ll allow me to generalize, then nine times out of 10, we give money, not because we sincerely think 20 rupees (80 rupees to the dollar, you do the math) is going to help these kids, but because it helps us sleep better at night.

You don’t have to be able to locate Nepal on the map to know it’s one of the poorest countries in the world. Or to infer from that that there is probably an equally high number of NGOs and do-gooders who flock here to save the world.

Pretty big task, saving the world. Where to start?

When I was a kid, I always pictured it like being like Tetris: Once you had accessed a certain level of education, you could go out into the world, work for the Peace Corp or Doctors Without Borders, administering band aids and medication and magic. Fit in some health care here, a little education there, and then presto: the blocks line up, all the poverty and disease and war disappears. You win, now proceed to the next level (read: retirement).

(By the way, back when I believed that, I figured I could have a career in world-saving. I’m fairly certain that that plan changed around the same time that I realized it was slightly more complicated.)

So where to start? Pretty daunting, saving the world, huh? Good place to do it, Nepal. Luckily, I was born to a religion that has a manual and answer to almost everything; in Judaism, they say saving one human life is like saving the whole world. So now all you need is that human life to save, and there you go, world fixed.

The question is, where to get that human life? Was it the little girl the other day I — in that patronizing way we have — gave a package of cookies to when she asked me for money, like right, there you go: Feeding someone some sugar and carbohydrates is really gonna stave off hunger for a few hours, much less a lifetime. The two young boys I purposefully ignored while site-seeing the other day, telling myself that by giving them money, I was only encouraging them to beg? As if my ignoring them would somehow send that message, instead of them just searching for a more lucrative deal with an unsuspecting tourist? Aren’t all these rhetorical questions (on top of being annoying), just patronizing? My Jewish manual on life would agree … You aren’t supposed to judge what the person you give money to does with it, just give it to them. On the other hand, I’m supposed to, I think, teach a man how to fish, but the closest body of water is filled with trash, so I’m not sure if that’s really such an option.

I don’t mean to paint such a dismal picture of Kathmandu — it’s not all pollution and poverty porn and suicidal chickens. And while I do think altruism is inherently selfish, I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing — those cute furry puppies and warm and fuzzies you feel when you help people is just nature’s way of perpetuating the pay-it-forward. Where it gets tricky is when you think beyond the coin you drop in someone’s coffee cup or donation you make to some organization at the grocery store (or money you give the kid chasing your car) and start making judgments. The idea behind “Save one life, save the world” is that if everyone did it, no one would need saving. But the problem with charity, or NGOs or anything else do-gooder, is that it belies this inherent belief that because I help you, I am superior to you, and therefore I get to make the call.

To close up and end the preaching, I’ll say this: In all of the anything I’ve ever heard the Dalai Lama say, it’s never been altruism or charity — it’s been compassion.

Then again, he wasn’t here to fact-check that, so you’ll have to take my word for it.