With the popularity of Slumdog Millionaire, we began to see more and more articles about poverty or slum tourism. Since it left a bad taste in our mouth, we did a little research (also known as sitting on our arse and websurfing) here and there but couldn’t bring ourselves to write a post about it… until now.
Hannah Rubenstein’s blog on poverty tourism (or “poorism,” yuck) raises many interesting and important questions. Hannah lived in Nicaragua recently and at one point was asked to take a group of American tourists to a nearby village, show them one of the typical houses, while introducing the large family that shared the one-room house to the tourist group. It sounds like it was an awkward few minutes for several reasons, including no “pre-education” for the tourists, very little in the way of integration of the local family into the “tour,” and no preparation for Hannah herself. It sounded almost like a zoo experience, the last thing anyone involved needs to associate this type of experience with.
The Mindful Tourist 