The New York Times recently ran an article about slum tourism or, as they refer to it, “poorism.” The piece claims that “tourists are forsaking, at least for a while, beaches and museums for crowded, dirty—and in many ways surprising—slums.” I can understand that people are concerned with this—class seems to be one of the most consistent and perpetually yawning prejudices between groups of people. From being born into castes to simply living like “the other half,” whichever that half is, it seems that people often have difficulty looking past privilege—or lack thereof—despite the inability to control it.

photo courtesy of IgoUgo member nik-nak

Without getting too deep into a discussion about class in and of itself, I think that it’s important to recognize that not all “poorism” is merely exploitative or voyeuristic. The article says that “a church group in Mazatlán, 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.” It’s hard to fault people who are looking to help, even if there is an ulterior motive of seeing a place or way of life that would ordinarily be off-limits.

When I was a teenager, I spent a month with a group in Dominica, living on Carib land and working with natives on projects within the reserve. We slept on a concrete schoolhouse floor, sharing the space with ants and assorted beetles. The kids in the area spent the first day collected around the window slats, staring in at us as we settled in and tried not to appear unsettled. At first, there was a good degree of awkwardness when we were unpacking our clothes in front of kids who had maybe two t-shirts if they were lucky.

Of course, it didn’t take long before we were friendly with the kids and most of the local craftsmen who appreciated our extra hands working on a new school house and local garage, and who taught us some of the requisite skills to build: some carpentry, cement-mixing, masonry, and plumbing. Despite the severe median between the paths of our lives up until that point—we arrived with cassette players that were more or less unattainable on the poorest island in the Caribbean—we started to become family. We were invited to houses where we met friends and friends of friends; we shared meals and played cricket with the kids.

To be honest, my experience on Dominica could be viewed as “poorism,” and the work I did there could be considered, the way one person interviewed by the Times put it, as a cheap way “to make Westerners feel better about their station in life.” There is no denying that, despite a desire to help and a willingness to rough it for a month, I was still heading back to New York City where my greatest concerns would involve my second-period Trigonometry class. That knowledge that my lot was not permanent naturally made suffering centipede bites and dysentery a bit more bearable than if I was living in one of the huts above the river, but there was never a time when I felt like or, more importantly, was made to feel like a tourist.

I challenge anyone to claim that expanding one’s horizons does not go both ways. There is no doubt that as much as I was changed by what I saw and did and by whom I met, that they were equally as affected by my presence and the effort and care that I put into helping. Perhaps wandering through a shantytown is different from what I did, but I bet people who live at The Dakota probably don’t love the throngs of Beatles-fan photographers who mill about their home either. Living there shouldn’t subject them to privacy invasion. The separation between a travel experience and a classist example of voyeurism is arguably slim, but is also easily defined by how you approach and treat the people involved.