The Moral of the Story

Perhaps some of you are familiar with the verse, “For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, a stranger and you welcomed me, naked and you clothed me, ill and you cared for me, in prison and you visited me.” Matthew 25:35-36 as well as the follow up verse, “Amen, I say to you, whatever you did for one of these least brothers of mine, you did for me.” –Matthew 25:40?
My adventures in Tibet brought me to a new understanding of this verse, though a painful one. The first and obvious connection is that I often saw the hungry, beggars who wanted food. Tibet, according to statistics a friend gave me, is one of the poorest nations (I guess I should say places) on earth, with an illiteracy rate more than 70%. And when you combine this with Tibet's being a major tourist destination for very rich tourists, it's not surprising that there is an entire culture of begging. In Lhasa they were on the streets, making supplicating gestures at you, because obviously you were white and had money. On the road, at the places we stopped they would come up to the windows of the car if we didn't get out and would point at the food we had sitting on the seats. They'd point to the food and then their mouths, making an eating motion. Besides a few rolls, I didn't give them any of my food. Some person huh? But people asking for food weren't the only ones I encountered. A young man asked me for my coat. Now he had one of his own, but it was old and worn, and he was living on one of those high passes we went through where it was always freezing. Now I'd like to tell you that I gave him my new coat, which was really something I'd only use a few times at Everest and maybe once or twice more back in the States every year. But I did not give him my coat. I wasn't a jerk about it, I made some lame excuse and sort of ducked my head and ran away. So it seems I failed on two counts, first the hungry and then the naked.
As bad is this is sounding for me, perhaps you would like to know if I have some purpose in telling you all this, perhaps you would like to understand how I could be so unchristian? Unfortunately it was easy.
I mean, when a person comes up to you asking for food, how do you know they aren't someone who is just making their living off begging when they could be earning money some other way? How do you know? Often we would arrive at some pass with a tremendous view and there would be all these people begging. But the pass is way out of the way from civilization, and if there were no tourists, these people would never have tried to spend time up there. Do they count as the starving? There wasn't anything particular about these people which made me think they were about to die from lack of food, (besides their voices.) And the guy who asked me for my coat? He wasn't shivering, he didn't look ill or anything. He was a strong young guy, there was nothing about him crying out cloth me! (Nothing except for his voice...).
So armed with these great weapons of reasoning, I never deigned to help these people. I had my dinners, slept in my warm beds, saw my mountain and came home. Out of sight out of mind, problem solved.
I'm not sure what else to say now. So maybe some of you can be of some help; what are we to do beyond actually sucking it up and helping the people who ask for it?