Affordable Housing Institute : US

For all their value, words are sometimes traps, because they condense reality into symbols.  As Alfred Korzybski put it in his study of general semantics, The map is not the territory, and however precise our language, we can never be quite sure that the other understood what we were trying to convey.
 

The less information conveyed, the more abstract it becomes

 

Nowhere is this more true in property site visits.  Long, long ago in a galaxy far, far away, I bought the economic equity in an affordable apartment property without myself never having seen it.  We’d had the sponsor’s descriptions, and a market survey, and plenty of photographs, but this was the one property that I never went to.  That omission was a mistake, as I realized when I did visit the property, long after the equity syndication had been completed. 

 

Buying a property you haven’t seen is like solving Rubik’s Cube blindfolded

 

Fortunately, I wasn’t punished for my sloth.  The property outperformed the projections, and all was well.  Sometimes you get lucky.

 

 

Despite this lesson, when at the 2005 Bellagio housing conference I first heard about the challenges of slum upgrading in Nairobi’s Kibera, I pictured ramshackle two and three story walkups, with rusty plumbing and drafty windows.  The reality, I discovered two months later, was quite different:

 

There’s a lot going on in Kibera

 

It was an experience I shall never forget.  Nor am I alone, to judge by this recent article from The New York Times:

 

MICHAEL CRONIN’s job as a college admissions officer took him to India two or three times a year, so he had already seen the usual sites — temples, monuments, markets — when one day he happened across a flier advertising “slum tours.”

 

“It just resonated with me immediately,” said Mr. Cronin, who was staying at a posh Taj Hotel in Mumbai where, he noted, a bottle of champagne cost the equivalent of two years’ salary for many Indians. “But I didn’t know what to expect.”

 

Soon, Mr. Cronin, 41, found himself skirting open sewers and ducking to avoid exposed electrical wires as he toured the sprawling Dharavi slum, home to more than a million. He joined a cricket game –

 

Two personal tips for traveling anywhere unfamiliar:

 

• Play the local game – cricket, soccer, dominos, backgammon.  The locals are flattered that you are interested, they appreciate that you’re not a stuck-up stickybeak, and they think it absolutely hilarious if you’re not totally incompetent.
• Take the kids’ picture.  Children are hams.  Most of them love being photographed, and somehow it makes you a normal person, and thus safe for the adults to ignore.

 

Interrupting their schoolyard cricket to mug for the camera

 

I think the tall white guy’s an outsider, don’t you?

 

– and saw the small-scale industry, from embroidery to tannery, that quietly thrives in the slum. “Nothing is considered garbage there,” he said. “Everything is used again.”

 

Mr. Cronin was briefly shaken when a man, “obviously drunk,” rifled through his pockets, but the two-and-a-half-hour tour changed his image of India.  “Everybody in the slum wants to work, and everybody wants to make themselves better,” he said.

 

Now entrepreneurs in some of the world’s largest slums – including Johannesburg’s Soweto, Nairobi’s Kibera, and Mumbai’s Dharavi – are offering tours, half-day or full-day, where you can experience the slum environment first hand. 

 

When a British man named Chris Way founded Reality Tours and Travel in Mumbai two years ago, he could barely muster enough customers for one tour a day. Now, he’s running two or three a day and recently expanded to rural areas.

 

Of course, it wouldn’t be the gray Lady if it didn’t find a dark side, as evidenced by the article’s subheader:

 

Slum Visits: Tourism or Voyeurism?

 

Obviously this is a false equivalence.  Voyeurism involves peeping into others’ private behavior without their knowledge or consent. 

 

Sister, you shouldn’t!

 

That’s not slum tourism

 

Think they’re feeling their privacy violated?

 

Slum tourism isn’t for everyone. Critics charge that ogling the poorest of the poor isn’t tourism at all. It’s voyeurism. The tours are exploitive, these critics say, and have no place on an ethical traveler’s itinerary.

 

“Would you want people stopping outside of your front door every day, or maybe twice a day, snapping a few pictures of you and making some observations about your lifestyle?” asked David Fennell, a professor of tourism and environment at Brock University in Ontario. Slum tourism, he says, is just another example of tourism’s finding a new niche to exploit. The real purpose, he believes, is to make Westerners feel better about their station in life. “It affirms in my mind how lucky I am — or how unlucky they are,” he said.

 

Sorry, Professor Fennell, based on my experience, you couldn’t be more wrong about what people in slums want.  As summarized recently in Budget Travel:

 

While the critics of so-called “poverty tourism” say that it exploits people, turning neighborhoods into zoos, the tours’ organizers argue that it can raise awareness about poverty, fight stereotypes, and bring money into areas that don’t benefit from tourism.

 

“Fifty-five percent of people in Mumbai live in slums,” says Chris Way, whose Reality Tours and Travel runs tours of the city’s Dharavi district, one of India’s biggest slums. “Through the tours you connect and realize that these people are the same as us.”

 

It’s Tolstoy’s question revisited: “What then must we do?”  The reproductive success of homo sapiens has given us a world unique in humanity’s existence, a world with billions of staggeringly poor people.  Which is the best course, never to tour, to tour only the rich neighborhoods, or to tour the slums?  To travel as a tourist, meaning an outsider, and curious.

 

“Tourism is one of the few ways that you or I are ever going to understand what poverty means,” said Harold Goodwin, director of the International Center for Responsible Tourism in Leeds, England. “To just kind of turn a blind eye and pretend the poverty doesn’t exist seems to me a very denial of our humanity.”

 

What poverty?

 

The crucial question, Mr. Goodwin and other experts say, is not whether slum tours should exist but how they are conducted. Do they limit the excursions to small groups, interacting respectfully with residents? Or do they travel in buses, snapping photos from the windows as if on safari?

 

Many tour organizers are sensitive to charges of exploitation. Some encourage — and in at least one case require — participants to play an active role in helping residents. A church group in Mazatlan, Mexico, runs tours of the local garbage dump, where scavengers earn a living picking through trash, some of it from nearby luxury resorts. The group doesn’t charge anything but asks participants to help make sandwiches and fill bottles with filtered water. The tours have proven so popular that during high season the church group has to turn people away. “We see ourselves as a bridge to connect the tourists to the real world,” said Fred Collom, the minister who runs the tours.

 

Cities are where people live; slums are where people live in incredible proximity to one another.  You might need a shower to wash off the grit, but you’ll have experiences unattainable any other way:

 

Pay enough and you can stay here, in the middle of downtown Mumbai

 

Chuck Geyer, of Reston, Va., arrived for a tour in Mumbai armed with hand sanitizer and the expectation of human misery incarnate. He left with a changed mind. Instead of being solicited by beggars, Mr. Geyer found himself the recipient of gifts: fruit, and dye to smear on his hands and face, as people celebrated the Hindu festival of Holi. “I was shocked at how friendly and gracious these people were,” Mr. Geyer said.

 

People are resilient.  People are friendly.  People are proud of their station. 

 

Responsible operators won’t bring people to communities where they’re not wanted. “My first concern was having the approval of the locals,” says Armstrong. “People are very enthusiastic because of the opportunity to change the stigmas about favelas. They’re happy that someone is interested in this little place that’s forgotten by Brazilian society.” Larson, the American tourist, also received a positive response from residents on her tour of Soweto. “The people we met seemed glad to have the tourists there,” she says.

 

People are ambitious.  People are curious. 

 

Riding in a tow truck, Ahmedabad, India

 

Good intentions aren’t always enough, however, and these excursions should be approached with sensitivity.

 

1. Does the tour organizer have ties to the community? Find out how long the operator has been running tours in the area and whether your guide is from there–these factors often determine the level of interaction you’ll have with residents. You should also ask how much of the proceeds goes to people in the community. Some companies donate as much as 80 percent of their profits, while others give less. Krista Larson, an American tourist who visited the Soweto township outside Johannesburg, South Africa, says she chose Imbizo Tours because it’s run by people who live in Soweto and it makes donations to local charities.

 

Making furniture in Kibera

 

2. What should I expect to see? You may have an abstract idea of what extreme poverty entails, but when you’re surrounded by it–not just the sights, but also the sounds and smells–it can be fairly overwhelming. Ask your guide what has tended to shock people before, so you can better prepare yourself. “Expect to jump over open sewage lines and heaps of rubbish, and to see crowded schools, with more than 50 kids in each room,” says James Asudi of Victoria Safaris, which leads tours of the Kibera slum in Nairobi, Kenya. People are often surprised to find a community that functions despite its hardships, says Marcelo Armstrong, who runs Favela Tour in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: “They don’t think they’ll see so much commerce and vibrancy.”

 

Slums are full of people in a hurry

 

The Budget travel article lists eight more, including:

 

4. Will I be safe? The fact that crime is prevalent in many slums doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a victim. It certainly helps that you’ll be in a group, and you should take the same kinds of precautions you would elsewhere, such as keeping your possessions close to you and not wearing expensive clothes or jewelry. Many tour companies don’t employ security guards, saying the areas they visit are safe. Victoria Safaris hires plainclothes policemen to trail tourists in Kibera at a distance–mainly as a crime deterrent, but also to create jobs.

 

People in slums have their labor and their brains.  They like to put both to work.

 

In Rio’s favelas, security is largely maintained by the drug dealers who control the neighborhoods. “The truth is that drug dealers make the peace,” says Armstrong. “Peace means no robbery, and that law is very well respected.”

 

When I was a kid, I remember being told that though the mafia controlled Boston’s North End, it was a very safe place to go, because they weren’t interested in doing anything that would give the cops a chance to come in.  They’re called protection rackets because protection is part of the package.

 

9. How can I help the people I meet? Contributions of clothing, toys, books, and other household items are often accepted before the tour, so you don’t have to worry about carrying or distributing them. Some companies will hold the items you bring until after the tour, when you can personally donate them to the school or community organization of your choice.

 

10. Do I have to go with a tour group? Travelers who dislike organized tours might want to make an exception in this case. If you go on your own, not only will you be less safe, but you may find it hard to navigate in neighborhoods that aren’t very well marked. And you’ll miss out on learning about daily life if you’re not with a knowledgeable guide–especially since most guidebooks tend to act as if these neighborhoods don’t exist.

 

On vacation, the Boss and I have often taken oddball tours – the Paris Catacombs, the Naples Mortuary, the Treetops Tour in Tsitsikamma, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West, Biosphere 2 – basically, anything human-created and complicated.  We always learn something.

 

Nancy at Philae, in Aswan

 

Even critics of slum tourism concede it allows a few dollars to trickle into the shantytowns, but say that’s no substitute for development programs.

 

Mr. Fennell, the professor of tourism in Ontario, wonders whether the relatively minuscule tourist revenue can make a difference. “If you’re so concerned about helping these people, then write a check,” he said.

 

You can’t guarantee that a check you write will get to the people you care about.  You can’t guarantee that the charity you give at the slum won’t be stolen the moment you leave.  You can guarantee that if you go, you’ll meet some people, and they’ll meet you.

 

Boy in Mavoko, Nairobi, Kenya

 

But slum tourism isn’t just about charity, its proponents say; it also fosters an entrepreneurial spirit. “At first, the tourists were besieged by beggars, but not anymore,” said Kevin Outterson, a law professor from Boston who has taken several favela tours. Mr. Fantozzi has taught people, Mr. Outterson said, “that you’re not going to get anything from my people by begging, but if you make something, people are going to buy it.”

 

It’s about learning.

 

If you get the chance, and are even mildly interested, take a slum tour.  It may change your life.

 

Want to tour a slum?

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