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[mmbcross]

Tourists have money, and they often bring their money to places that desperately need it. Even when they visit sites as destitute as the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, the opportunity exists for the local community to profit from the presence of tourists if the visitors' money finds its way into the hands of those who need it most.

But does it?
http://www.travelweekly.com/Article.aspx?i...p;terms=poorism

Is visiting slums on your tour of India or Brazil derogatory or beneficial or do these tours merely pile one more layer of pain atop the aggregate suffering of the world's poor?

[starlagurl]

Oh wow... this relates to the "dark tourism" thread from before...very interesting stuff... I don't know if I could actually bring myself to go on one of these tours...nope...thought about it...never could I bring myself on one of these tours.

"The increased interest and participation in this up-close-and-personal type of touring can perhaps be attributed to a larger trend in tourism: the desire of travelers to avoid the artificiality of man-made resorts and plastic paradises and instead seek out the unfamiliar real world."

This seems to me an oxy moron...if you have to have someone organizing your "tour of real life", it ceases to be real life anymore, and automatically becomes a "plastic" experience...am I right? At least it seems right to me.

[wakingdream]

I would personally be uncomfortable going on a tour of slums. Not that I've never been through poor neighborhoods, but there are other ways to gain knowledge about the poor.

I kind of feel like the people get put on display. I'm mixed about it ut feel more negatively toward "poorism". It's like the tours of the refuge camp in, hmm, southern Thailand or Cambodia, not sure which one. People taking pictures of the refugees etc. To me it's like going to a zoo but in other ways I can see how it could open people's eyes and minds.....

( I couldn't read the article. It asked me to sign up......)

the desire of travelers to avoid the artificiality of man-made resorts and plastic paradises and instead seek out the unfamiliar real world."

This seems to me an oxy moron...if you have to have someone organizing your "tour of real life", it ceases to be real life anymore, and automatically becomes a "plastic" experience...am I right? At least it seems right to me.

Yeah, I would definitely agree Louise. What's wrong with touring on your own if you really want a "real" experience? I don't necessarily mean slums, but touring around in neighborhoods and areas of a country your visiting is pretty normal to me. I think some people get bent out of shape if they have to see and do things without a tour. Nothing wrong with tours in general but I believe the most exciting part of travel is exploring and discovering on your own and having unique experiences.....that's the point for me anyway.

[starlagurl]

Yeah blah, it's kind of sickening, the layers upon layers of "real traveling experiences" there seems to be nowadays.

Putting bureaucracy between you and your destination is no longer necessary. Even back in the day, it wasn't!

These agencies that can bring you around, put your trip into one (cheap) package, including feel-good volunteering time with the locals, are kind of disheartening. It just seems lazy to me.

When I was a kid, my parents used to order a CAA "triptich (sp?)" a fancy schmancy map with a pre-highlighted route that we should take on our roadtrips and we went! That's about all the bureaucracy we had when we traveled.

Now, with the internet you can map your route, buy your own tickets, find interesting destinations and attractions, small, family operated B&Bs, etc. etc. all with a couple of searches and clicks... it's easier than ever to support the local economy, so why should you pay somebody else to connect you?

[mmbcross]

Here's the article. It's worth reading it all.

Poorism: The economics of exploitation
May 05, 2008
By Michelle Baran

Responsible poorism
Poorism can seem ugly when it's thought of as simply gawking at the poor as they go about their daily business.

Harold Goodwin, professor at the International Centre for Responsible Tourism, recalled visiting an elderly woman in Langa, a slum in Cape Town, South Africa, who wanted to open a restaurant in her front room. As he and the woman were exiting her home, an enormous, 52-seat motorcoach was outside.

"There were people standing at the windows, taking photographs of us, because I was emerging, and presuming it was very odd to see a white person emerging from one of these houses," Goodwin recalled. "She turned to me and said, 'They see us like animals. It's as though they're on safari. They're taking pictures of us as though I'm an animal.'"

It's a troubling image. But is there a way to engage in more responsible poorism?

Many believe there is. Goodwin offered some tips on what travelers and agents should look for in an operator in order to provide an experience that creates less distance between the tourist and the local residents.

• Go with a local person, someone who's known. You can tell if your guide knows people if he or she smiles and says hello to everyone.
• Don't take risks. Go with a small operator that's going to look after you.
• Look for a tour vehicle that places you in a position of relative equality, not a vehicle in which you're staring at locals through a glass window and taking photographs. Goodwin recommended smaller, four- to six-person vans or minibuses, as opposed to the oversized, 50- and 60-seat motorcoaches.
• Consider spending money on things people produce in that community.
• Inquire as to who's benefiting from your visit.

"It's about respecting the fact that people may not like you there as a tourist," Goodwin said.

"But experience seems to suggest that when people go in in a nonaggressive way, generally tourists are welcome." -- M.B.

Tourists have money, and they often bring their money to places that desperately need it. Even when they visit sites as destitute as the favelas of Rio de Janeiro or the slums of Nairobi, Kenya, the opportunity exists for the local community to profit from the presence of tourists if the visitors' money finds its way into the hands of those who need it most.

But does it?

That question has been asked with increasing frequency in recent years as a result of the growing popularity of "poorism," a somewhat derogatory label applied to slum tours or other types of outings that bring visitors into extremely impoverished areas of the world. Are the residents of these areas actually benefiting from such excursions, or do these tours merely pile one more layer of pain atop the aggregate suffering of the world's poor?

To some extent, the answer lies not just in the economic repercussions of the tour but on the motivation behind it.

"It's a matter of what the relationship is when you make that visit," said Harold Goodwin, professor at the International Centre for Responsible Tourism. "If it's purely voyeuristic, if all you're doing is going to look at the poor and take photographs, that seems to me to be exploitative and unacceptable."

On the other hand, Goodwin added, "Not to be exploited, not to be economically engaged, not to have the opportunity to earn from these things is far worse."

Poorism traces its roots to the mid-1980s, when a company called Favela Tour began offering walking tours of the notorious slum neighborhoods of Rio and Face to Face Tours started guiding the curious through Soweto, then an all-black township at the southwestern edge of Johannesburg, South Africa. (Soweto was annexed to Johannesburg in 2002.) More than 20 years later, Jimmy Ntintili, founder of Face to Face, claims to have guided more than a million people through Soweto.

Over time, as the number of tours of the South African townships around Johannesburg and Cape Town has continued to expand, more and more operators have been getting into the poorism business, organizing tours of areas that range from the Kibera slums of Nairobi to the Dharavi slums of Mumbai, India.

Salaam Baalak Trust in India, for example, offers guided walks through the inner city of Paharganj and the New Delhi railway station to observe the lives of street children. Vineyard Ministries in Mazatlan, Mexico, offers a tour in which participants can bring sandwiches to feed scroungers at a local landfill.

But Goodwin believes that while many of these tours seem to have a similar objective on the surface -- to show people of affluence what life is like for those who live in squalor -- it's what lies beneath the tours that really makes a difference.

Goodwin was a pioneer of the concept of "pro-poor tourism," a concept he says can apply to the slum tours if they are organized and managed effectively. "The idea is if you're going to visit a destination, it's your responsibility to try to make sure that the money you spend there benefits people in that destination, in that local community," he said.

Reality check
The increased interest and participation in this up-close-and-personal type of touring can perhaps be attributed to a larger trend in tourism: the desire of travelers to avoid the artificiality of man-made resorts and plastic paradises and instead seek out the unfamiliar real world.

Whether it's a slum tour, working with a community to help build a school or doing a home stay with a local family, tourists are exhibiting greater interest in engaging more intimately with the communities they visit.

Their quest, said David Clemmons, founder of Voluntourism.org, is not entertainment in the traditional sense but authenticity and engagement.

"With voluntourism, with slum tours, with all these things coming into the market space now, they're starting to take the veneer off the destination and let people see it for what it really is," Clemmons said. "And what we're discovering is people like it more. It feels more authentic. They can really connect to the destination in a deeper way."

But critics see a home stay or a volunteer project as being vastly different than a walking tour through a shantytown. Among them is Bruce Poon Tip, CEO of Canadian operator GAP Adventures, which offers volunteer-oriented trips as well as journeys that include home stays with local families.

"Certainly people are interested in finding out more about the real, un-touristy side of any destination," said Poon Tip. But he added: "When you're volunteering, you're being of assistance, giving back to the community. When you're taking a tour, there's something kind of odd about it, looking at disadvantaged people for your own entertainment."

He said that after the 2004 tsunami that killed more than 225,000 people across Asia, GAP Adventures got a lucrative offer to take 200 people to see the devastation.

"It was a very odd and macabre request," said Poon Tip. He turned down the opportunity because "it's just not something that we're comfortable offering as an experience for people."
But from the point of view of slum-tour operators like James Asudi, general manager of Nairobi-based Victoria Safaris, guiding people through an underprivileged area is a legitimate way to fight the poverty they see all around them.

"The premise of a slum-tour operation," Asudi wrote in an e-mail, "is to create awareness of the existence of the slums and the less privileged poor families who live in the slums, with an intention of slum upgrading and consequently total eradication through tourism."

Victoria Safaris, in addition to offering traditional safaris, nature trips and city tours throughout Kenya, offers a walking tour through the Kibera, Korokocho, Mukuru and Mathare slums of Nairobi, at $50 for a half day or $100 for a full day.

"Most if not all tourists into Kenya come for wildlife safaris and beach hotel tours, neglecting the populace," Asudi wrote. He added that when tourists take a slum tour in Nairobi they have an opportunity to see people "who live in Kenya without proper housing and sanitation, while tourism revenue leads as the highest revenue earner for the government."

Chris Way, owner and general manager of Mumbai-based Reality Tours and Travel, makes a similar argument. He said his tour of Dharavi showed tourists a part of Mumbai where 55% of people in the city live. (For more, see Richard Turen's interview with Way, "To hell and back for $6 and change.")

"It's up to the individual to decide how it affects them," Way wrote in an e-mail. "For some, they are amazed by the recycling plants; for others they find it a very humbling experience, amazed how people are so productive and apparently happy with very little material possessions."

Poverty profits
While slum tours and touring through impoverished communities can undoubtedly be an eye-opening experience for the tourist, the concern most often voiced is whether the local residents have anything to gain. Most slum-tour operators claim to give back to the community in some way.

Reality Tours and Travel said that 80% of profits go to a nongovernmental organization that "does good work for the poorer communities of Mumbai."

Victoria Safaris said it hands over the profits from its slum tours to the tourists to hand over to the poor.

Salaam Baalak Trust, a nonprofit, said all proceeds go directly to the trust to create more opportunities for street children.

But Goodwin remains skeptical. If operators claim to be putting money toward a certain community project, "you should expect to see that project and be very suspicious if somebody says they're putting back a portion of the profit," he said.

As is the case with many charities, there is no official monitoring of these smaller operators to find out if they are truly giving back to the community. Even so, tourists have opportunities to give, regardless of the operator's motives, when they engage with the local residents directly. During those moments, they can purchase crafts, food and beverages directly from the people who most need financial support. Or, if they visit a school or medical facility, they can communicate with the administrative staff about donating goods or money directly to the institution.

The long view
Probably the most serious concern about the future of slum tours is sustainability. Ginger Smith, academic chair at New York University's Preston Robert Tisch Center for Hospitality, Tourism and Sports Management, said that while a group of tourists coming through a certain slum once a week can potentially provide a small, steady revenue stream for locals or for a critical institution like a school or medical facility, slum tours, as they stand right now, are not sustainable.

"You can't just go in," Smith said. "You have to engage the whole community and make them part of it. It is a commitment that takes time, and it's ongoing."

Moreover, it takes responsible operators and organizations to oversee an operation properly to ensure that each individual trip is contributing to a larger whole, to longer-term progress.
Voluntourism.org's Clemmons believes that ultimately it's impossible to really gauge all the benefit.

"Is it something that's sustainable?" Clemmons asked. "Well, we don't know. We don't know if one of the people that goes on one of these trips doesn't decide to come back later on and help build a school." On the other hand, he said, to claim that poorism "is going to change the course of people's lives and help them exit poverty ... it's ludicrous to even believe that that would be the case. But certainly, there are those folks out there that have that stance and say, 'It's not sustainable, so why do you do it in the first place?'"

The catch-22 is that if tourists don't venture into impoverished areas, those areas will not have access to tourism dollars, but as they do tour these areas, opportunities for exploitation present themselves.

"It's part of a broad trend in travel to having a more intimate experience, and absolutely, the trend is entirely positive," said Goodwin. "But if it's not managed, my view would be that generally it will become very exploitative."

To contact reporter Michelle Baran, send e-mail to mbaran@travelweekly.com.

[bloomer]

Got to say, I don't like the idea. Best to learn some of the language, smile a lot, and see what happens. "Touring" slums seems to me a little depraved.

But then again, I liked Koch's New York better than the present disneyland for hipsters it has become.

[starlagurl]

Ha! Funny...I went in the late 80s, and afterwards in the late nineties and also 2002, I think I know what you're talking about...

Definitely no more authentic smelling urine puddles...

[bloomer]

Gotta love the "grit." Keeps the riffraff out.

[inasia2008]

You can tour some of the tower blocks in the UK and get the smell of urine from the elevators...

[starlagurl]

Which tower blocks?

[inasia2008]

A tower block is what we refer to an apartment block as!

[mmbcross]

How about "Voluntourism" Another dubious "ism". Wade through this article and see what you think:

Voluntourism
Published May 2008 Condé Nast Traveler
I am stirring cement outside a mud house in a Peruvian farming community, wondering, just a little bit, why I am here. This is, in fact, my hands-on introduction to voluntourism; one of the family's sons is soaking bricks in water, while Mercedes, who runs the volunteer program, is prepping the kitchen's dirt floor. I don't speak Spanish, so I can't learn much about these people's lives except what I can see—from the outhouse, to the donkeys laden with jugs of milk for the tiny cheese-making operation, to the room upstairs where the family of six sleeps, with a TV rigged for reception with aluminum foil at the end of the antenna. Nor am I an expert in building. So why do they need me to help them build a stove?

Combining volunteer work with holidays was once the domain of nonprofits, small adventure companies, and granola-crunching backpackers—a bit like me out there in the Peruvian highlands. But these days, a lot of us are hoping to give back when we travel. According to a poll conducted by Condé Nast Traveler and MS-NBC, only fourteen percent of Americans have taken a volunteer holiday, but fifty-five percent say they would like to. And of those who have gone on volunteer trips, ninety-five percent say they are likely to do it again. "Travelers are looking for a sense of purpose in their leisure activities," says Brian Mullis, president of the Sustainable Travel International, which advises travel companies on voluntourism. "They are looking at new ways of distributing wealth. The age of checkbook philanthropy is morphing into the age of participatory philanthropy."

But does spending a few days as a volunteer in Peru or Timbuktu really do any good, or is it just another way for us spoiled First World travelers to assuage our guilt? It's often difficult to assess which projects are worthy—not to mention how much of the traveler's money is going to the local community. What is the value of an inexperienced volunteer showing up to teach English, only to be replaced by another unskilled person a few days later? There are certainly volunteer travel programs—even well-intended ones—that don't actually help much. But when done right, volunteering can both contribute to local communities and be life changing for the traveler. "An important part of what comes out of voluntourism is social capital: It breaks down stereotypes," says David Clemmons, founder of voluntourism.org, a nonprofit that offers tips on choosing volunteer trips. "For the traveler, it can help you retool and rethink your life philosophy, and the local people end up with a different image of foreigners. Is that worth the thousand dollars you paid to build that stove? You betcha!" (For some of Clemmons's tips, see cntraveler.com/makeadifference.)

But an unregulated hodgepodge of for-profit and nonprofit enterprises offering volunteer travel has cropped up—making it tough to know which ones are worthy and raising questions about for-profit tour operators getting into the business of charity. Responsibletravel.com, a for-profit travel company, saw a twenty-nine percent increase in its volunteer tour business last year. North American business at I-to-I, Britain's largest for-profit volunteer tour operator, has grown forty percent over the past two years. Some volunteers, however, have complained that the company gives too little to local communities. I-to-I stresses that it is not a charity; fees go toward researching projects and paying support teams, accommodations, meals, and training. "The politics is really frustrating, because at the end of the day our company wants to match people who wish to have learning experiences with community projects and useful services," says Bruce Haxton, I-to-I's director of operations. "We are about a lot more than volunteering. This is about meaningful travel."

Should travelers be wary of for-profit companies doing volunteer travel? Not necessarily, according to experts in responsible travel. "I don't care what a company's motivation is, as long as the program has merit," says Christina Heyniger, a voluntourism consultant. "If the company sees a marketing opportunity, God bless them."

Voluntourism has even hit the luxury market. A number of high-end travel agents will arrange volunteer experiences. Ritz-Carlton Hotels has launched Give Back Getaways, offering volunteer experiences in many communities where it has properties, from planting trees outside Santiago to building playgrounds for orphans near Moscow. "Our guests want pampered experiences, but they also want the chance to do something in the community," says Sue Stephenson, who runs the company's philanthropy programs.

So given the confusion, how to do voluntourism the right way? The answer: Ask a lot of questions. "It's all about due diligence," says Clemmons. What's important is how much money goes back to the community. "Whether you're giving money or talent, it has to fit the community's needs," says Martha Honey of the Center on Ecotourism and Sustainable Development, which is holding a philanthropy tourism conference in Tanzania in December.

The bottom line is that you should be realistic about what you are achieving. If you're spending a day or two working, don't expect to save the world. "If it's packaged like tourism and looks like tourism, it's tourism," says Kate Simpson, who founded the British Web site ethicalvolunteering.org. "Giving money is great, but these companies sell us the idea that we can take time out from our holiday and change peoples lives. If development were that simple, it would have been sorted out long ago."

Voluntourism is in part about feeling good. It is about giving, but it's also about learning. After spending a week building a stove in Peru, I realized that the questions I had been asking were all wrong. Yes, the tour operator should have asked if I spoke Spanish. No, I wasn't saving these farmers from poverty. But the family got a new stove. And I, in the bargain, learned about people who can thrive with very little. My trip was as much about how it changed me as about what it did for them. And maybe that's okay.

[introducinlyric]

I would personally be uncomfortable going on a tour of slums. Not that I've never been through poor neighborhoods, but there are other ways to gain knowledge about the poor.

I kind of feel like the people get put on display. I'm mixed about it ut feel more negatively toward "poorism". It's like the tours of the refuge camp in, hmm, southern Thailand or Cambodia, not sure which one. People taking pictures of the refugees etc. To me it's like going to a zoo but in other ways I can see how it could open people's eyes and minds.....

Couldnt agree more with what susie has said, my thoughts on the subject almost to a T

[starlagurl]

Hmmmm... good articles, Martin...

He's saying voluntourism is more about changing the person that is going on the trip, than it is about actually helping the world right?

I just don't understand why you need to pay somebody to do that though... Can't you just go around observing on your own then? Is $500 or more worth it for a "life changing experience"? Or are you just saying you had such an experience because you don't want your money to be wasted?

It reminds me of people that go to the opera and pay $200 for a ticket, and then walk out, not understanding a word, and saying IT WAS FABULOUS!

[mmbcross]

I volunteer (!) at our Performing Arts Centre as an usher. I get to see the operas for free. I don't understand a word, except we have subtitles in English and Spanish over the stage. Regrettably I don't get to sit in the US$ 200.00 seats.

[starlagurl]

I do that too, but at the summer arts festivals.