This paper investigates how notions of obligation factor into the begging encounter in one Beirut neighborhood known for its bustling café environment that caters to affluent residents and tourists. The number of people who ask for money, food, and other life necessities has increased dramatically in Beirut over the past decade. This is partly due to the influx of Syrian refugees to Beirut after the 2011 onset of the Syrian conflict as well as a steep increase in poverty rates among Lebanese following Lebanon’s 2019 financial crisis. Moreover, Lebanon’s context of chronic organized abandonment (Gilmore 2022) has led many to relinquish their expectation of the Lebanese state to fulfill its obligations to the people and has increased skepticism towards NGOs in light of the NGO-ization of social assistance in the country. I draw on 12 months of participant observation and qualitative interviews with those on the giving and receiving end of the café begging encounter—café managers, waiters, customers, and those who beg—to ask two major questions: 1) who do people choose to help and ask for help from, and why? 2) how/do notions of obligation and community boundaries become (re)configured as people respond to the ubiquitous begging encounter? This paper reveals how hegemonic notions of kinship obligations are drawn on to both justify and counter the idea that the obligation to assist beggars belongs to individuals and kin rather than the state and NGOs. Furthermore, this paper argues that ideas of dignified labor and “proper family values” associated with family obligations to care for relatives serve as criteria to blame beggars for their predicament and are used to re-inscribe existing class, citizenship, and sectarian differentiations. There is a rich body of work within Middle East anthropology that studies how people in the region make sense of and live with hegemonic categories of relatedness and difference, such as sectarianism, citizenship, and kinship, to forge solidarities and connections across various scales of society. My research attends to the processes through which people’s sense of obligation to others is conceptualized vis a vis the begging encounter and helps us think about how obligation, relationality, and community boundaries are brought into relief and called into question within a context of organized abandonment, in Lebanon and beyond.