Beggars or Humans?

As a person living in a third world country Pakistan, it was quite normal for me to see poor people laying on the side of the roads in a scorching summer day without adequate food and water. Begging people for a chime, cleaning cars windscreen, or selling flowers. These are those people who never gets treated respectfully and are always ignored by the state as well. These people strive hard to even survive a day. They have no idea about what will happen with them in the future or even will they have a future at all? These are those people who have no greed of power. They just want them and their family to survive. A person with a much more stable life always deals with such beggers with a nature of disgust and complete ignorance. But have we ever tried to understand the true nature of such people? Have we ever thought about the fact that they all are humans just like us before dealing with them like animals.

So one day at Sunday morning i was on my bike traveling from my home to another city. It was an extremely hot day and most of the shops were closed. The roads were quite empty and there was no sign of traffic at all in the highway. So I was just riding and suddenly my bike broke down and it slipped and I got hurt pretty badly. Even my phone broke down so I can't even contact anyone for help. At that time I could not even properly and due to blood loss, extreme hot temperature and unavailability of water i was slowly loosing my conscious. After about 10 minutes, I saw a car coming towards and believe it was a ray of sunshine for me. I used my whole energy left in me to stand up and I signaled the car to stop and help me but for my surprise, the car did saw me but did not stopped.

At that time I gave up and laid down and started to re live my whole life as I thought my life is about to end due to continuous blood loss. But suddenly I heard someone was running towards me and screaming that 'May Allah help you, bring water'. And in a few seconds about 8 people were standing around without shoes on the hot road. They were beggars. I was a little worried that are they here to rob me as I was carrying a lot of money and I also had a laptop in my bag. But to my surprise, they helped me to stand up and gave me some water and stopped the bleeding. Then they took me to their tent house which was only 5 minutes away from the highway. They cleaned my wounds and tied them with clean cloth. And they fed me with some fruits and gave me fresh milk. They took care of me for a while and after some time one of them came with an old mobile phone so I can call for help. I contacted my friends and family and they came to help me in no time.

Emergency van also arrived and while the medical officials were picking me up, I thanked the beggars and offered them a hefty amount of money. But again to my surprise the rejected the money. I asked why? They said "We don't want any money, we just wanted to help you as you are human like us. We knew how you were feeling as we know how it feels to be helpless". I was completely speechless and my eyes were full of tears. My heart was touched. At my way to the hospital I was only thinking about one thing that how can we call a person a beggar whose heart is full of care and is generous. And for me a rich heart is more precious than any worldly possession. At the end of the day the lesson that I learned was that everyone is the same. There is no rich and poor. We all are equal. We all are humans.