David Pescovitz:
Poorism is an interesting trend where travelers are taken on guided tours through impoverished areas such as Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and the areas outside of Cape Town and Johannesburg. In the new issue of Smithsonian, writer John Lancaster goes on an escorted venture through Dharavi, Mumbai, where a million people live along a creek in an area half the size of Manhattan’s Central Park, there’s apparently only one toilet for every 1,440 people, and residents work in thousands of illegal factories. Lancaster’s guides are Christopher Way and Krishna Poojari, proprietors of Reality Tours & Travel, “a unique tour and travel agency, based in Mumbai, India, that specializes in guided tours of Dharavi- Asia′s biggest ’slum,’” according to their Web site. From Smithsonian:
Besides the Dharavi tours—which can be combined with visits to Mumbai’s red-light district and Dhobi Ghat, a vast open-air laundry—the company offers sightseeing of a more conventional nature, along with hotel bookings and airport transportation. Way has pledged that once the company starts making a profit, it will donate 80 percent of its slum-tour earnings to a charitable group that works in Dharavi. “I didn’t want to make money from the slum tours,” he says. “It wouldn’t have felt right…”
Not for the first time on the tour, I felt like an interloper, and I wondered how the slum workers and their families felt about white-skinned strangers who showed up to gawk from the threshold. For Dharavi was undeniably grim. As we neared its center, the alleys narrowed and cantilevered balconies closed out the sun, casting everything in a permanent gloom. Children played next to gutters that flowed with human waste, and hollow-eyed men bent nearly double under the weight of burlap-covered loads. But if the people of Dharavi resented us, they kept it to themselves. Some even seemed happy to take part in our education. “Here, everybody is working,” a man said genially, and in perfect English, as we paused outside the yogurt-cup recycling operation where he sat sipping tea with the owner.
The welcoming reception probably had something to do with the tour operators, who have cultivated good relations with the slum workers as well as local police. There are, moreover, certain rules. From the door of a one-room garment factory, I spotted a boy who looked to be no more than 8 sitting with other workers at a long table, where he was embroidering fabric with fine gold thread. I nudged my guide: “Ask him how old he is.” Poojari shook his head no. Pointed questions were not part of his compact with the slum dwellers….
As it happens, (the other tourist on the trip) and I did not see many child laborers in Dharavi, perhaps because of laws limiting employment of children under 14 or, more likely—as Way suggested later—because they were sequestered out of view. We did see several schools, however, and plenty of kids in uniforms. “By plane you are coming?” one boy asked in English, before declaring, with evident pride, “I’m studying in 8th standard.”
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Originally by David Pescovitz from Boing Boing on March 5, 2007, 9:57am
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