Blog Post #5, "Slum Tourism"

                We recently listened to an interview on NPR in class about a family, Julian, Ena and their children, who swapped their comfortable lives and home for a shack in Mamelodi, living only on $300/month. They decided to do this after visiting their cleaning lady at her home for tea one day. She lives only about six miles away from them, in an entirely different world. They had both heard about two people from India who had done a similar thing, which gave them their idea. While living there they both still went to work, all while trying to adjust to this new, temporary life and a tight budget. They go on to discuss during the interview what they found to be the best and worst experiences during their month in Mamelodi. The husband said that his worst experience had to be the tweets he saw a couple of days before they started their journey. They were told they were glamourizing poverty by young South Africans, and that they were bringing their children into an unsafe environment by doing this from friends.

                While listening to this interview I had similar thoughts to those of the South African people who were upset. They only went for a month, which would not even come close to giving them the real experiences that these people go through every day. While they kept themselves on a strict budget of only $300 for the whole month, if they really had needed to dip into their bank accounts they could have. They had the option of leaving at any point if they felt it necessary.

                I was also confused for their reasoning. They say that they went there; to do this for themselves, to change themselves. This points again in the direction of poverty tourism. They went on to say in the interview that some people would call what they did slum tourism, but that they did not agree, and they did not know of any alternative. In my opinion, the alternative would have been to go there in hopes of trying to help the community. It is great that they wanted to try to immerse themselves in the culture, to understand how these people live differently from them, but they should have gone with some goal in mind to help.

                After listening to the interview I found their blog they wrote during their time in Mamelodi. Most of it was describing their day to day lives living there, from talking about transportation to how they interacted within the community. One post I found titled “A National Emergency” addressed the question of people asking what they were going to do with this information after they were done. They once again state how they went there for themselves, and that they wanted to start a conversation not create action. The part that bothered me the most was when they talked about what would happen if they did try to do something. They are quoted as saying, “Sure, if an Early Childhood Development centre was started, that would be great, but what of the low quality schooling thereafter. What about the lack of electricity to study at night, what about the high rates of drug addiction and alcoholism that pull families apart. What about the exorbitant cost of transportation on the family budget. Even if all of these were addressed, where are all the jobs to strive for in the first place.” While these would all be tough to deal with, that is no excuse for not trying to help.

http://mamelodiforamonth.co.za/

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=228482602

Observation: I read an article about homelessness in New York City being at 50,000. This happened despite efforts to lower the homeless population from 38,000 about five years ago.