Hardening of the heart

Ethiopia has a culture of begging, and the heat of the blowtorch is focused on tourists. Addis Abbaba as the capital and largest city is filled with beggars, and you can't walk anywhere without passing a few beggars sitting on the footpath or being chased by a few kids, or having a hand thrust in the window of the minibus. And whilst you can give some money to a few people there is a limit and in most cases you end up saying no far more than you give.
You start to find yourself doing strange things, crossing the road to avoid a beggar, pretending to be engrossed in the clouds in the sky to avoid catching the eye of a beggar, or developing suspect theories about to whom you should give and then be forced to make evaluations about the worthiness of beggars – he doesn't look that bad or why should I give her anything if she has three kids.
The whole process though leads to a hardening of the heart, you can feel sympathy seeping out of you as you continually say no, and have to walk past people who are struggling to survive. When you are confronted repeatedly by such poverty it is much more difficult to forget about it and pretend it doesn't exist. And yet at the end of each day you feel like your heart is slowly turning to stone as you failed to help so many people to whom what for you is almost nothing to them is another day of life. I fear eventually that I will become so insensitive to it that the heart will stop feeling.