New tour takes visitors into LA’s ganglands

Tourists looking for a thrill in Los Angeles can now take a bus tour of the city’s most dangerous ganglands. For $65, LA Gang Tours takes visitors around the city, pointing out gang graffiti and stopping at sights like the Los Angeles Riverbed, Florence Avenue, and the Pico Union Graffiti Lab.

It seems tourists are always drawn to places with a dangerous auras and violent pasts, places that are the complete opposite of our comfortable lives at home. The question is, do we go to these places, places like the slums of Mumbai, the townships of Johannesburg or the streets of South Central LA, because we want to understand what life is like for the people there, or do we go to gawk or just so we can say “I’ve been there”? And do these tours actually help the communities that are put on display, or do they make them a spectacle?

LA Gang Tours was created by Alfred Lomas, a former gang member, who says the tour will create 10 part-time jobs for ex-gang members who will lead tours and share their own stories. He says his goal is to help residents of South Central,”to give profits from the tours back to these areas for economic growth and development, provide job/entrepreneur training, micro-financing opportunities and to specialize in educating people from around the world about the Los Angeles inner city lifestyle, gang involvement and solutions.”I’d actually be curious to take the tour, which is scheduled to run once per month. It sounds like, in this case, the tour may be run in a way that takes a more anthropological, rather than exploitative, look at the community. The tour bus is unmarked, and out of respect for area residents, riders on the tour are not permitted to take photos or video.

While in Cape Town, I had the opportunity to tour Robben Island, the prison where political “criminals” were held during apartheid. When the tour guide, himself a former prisoner, was asked why he would do this – lead tours and relive the pain of his imprisonment every day – for a living, he responded with two reasons. One, he said, was because he wanted people to know what happened. The second was that every boatload of tourists that came to the island meant one more person who would have a job.

Perhaps it’s naive to think that welcoming a bus-full of tourists once a month could help solve the many problems of the area. But if offering the tours keeps one more ex-gang member employed running tours and out of gang life, well, at least it’s a start.

[via Chicago Tribune]

%Gallery-13474%

%Gallery-38511%

Slum tours in Jakarta now operating

An Indonesian tour operator, is now offering tourists the chance to see the ‘other’ side of Jakarta – a side tucked away from the sprawling shopping malls and 5-star hotels.

Jakarta Hidden Tours is advertising 3 different separate routes through the slums, allowing you to “explore Jakarta with a local and see how the majority of people live, work and raise their kids”.

Poverty tourism” has come into the spotlight since the release of Danny Boyle’s Oscar-winning Slumdog Millionaire.

Robert Finlayson, from Volunteering for International Development from Australia, helps run the tours and believes that the tours help social understanding. “Guilt is like pity, it stops you from seeing people as they actually are,” Finlayson was reported as saying. “What we wanted to say is…People are the same all over the world.”

Head of the Jakarta Urban Poor Consortium advocacy group, Wardah Hafidz, disagrees. “”It creates more problems for us than it helps,” Ms Hafidz said. “If you come with money then it’s a complete language of money. It doesn’t develop the understanding that they (the slum dwellers) are powerful, that they can help themselves.”

What do you think? Should tourists support this type of travel?
%Poll-31632%
[via AFP]

Slumdog Millionaire: Not too crazy about it

Spoiler alert. Oscar season is here. I’ve seen all the movies in the major categories and some. At the risk of sounding crabby and uncool–not with it, I wasn’t enamored with Slumdog Millionaire. Yes, yes, yes, I know the movie is considered mighty fine, and a shoo in to bring home Oscar on Sunday, but at times when asked what I thought about it, I’ve declared, “I hated it.”

That’s not true. I didn’t hate, it but I’m not fond of it either. Of the movies nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, I liked it the least. Somewhere during the middle of the movie, about the time the two brothers were tossed off the train, I had an unsettled feeling, a bit of unease–the feeling that I was being manipulated to have certain ideas about India, poverty, and what might make it feel better. It felt exploitative in a Hollywood, feel good kind of way.

I have company. In a conversation with former Peace Corps volunteers, we tried to pinpoint what bothered us the most about the film. We didn’t come up with anything specific, but it has something to do with our own experiences of living in the midst of poverty, and how the movie piled on bad news in huge helpings with only one solution to address the mess–win gobs of money and get the girl. .

It’s not that there aren’t kids who get maimed to make them better beggars. There are–some. I’d say not many. It’s not that people haven’t been killed in India because of unrest between the Muslims and the Hindus (or Christians for that matter). Some have been. It’s not that there isn’t organized crime in India. There is. And, it’s not that the police wouldn’t torture a person in India. Some do. Throw in the prostitution angle and the movie covers it all. Not the bride burning, though. That wasn’t included–it must have been left off the laundry list of bad things to include in the repertoire of really, really bad things that happen to people in India. (I’d venture to say, there are equally bad things that might happen anywhere, but India is in these days, particularly since any one who needs assistance over the phone is likely to be talking to someone in India.)

So, here we have a movie that piles on all the worst India offers on it’s worst days and shows seemingly endless scenes of torture and child endangerment. But, it’s a feel good movie because at the end, the bad guys are dead, the police turn nice, the talk show host has a change of heart, and one of the only two positive characters in the storyline wins amounts of money that most of us will never see. PLUS, he gets the girl–the girl being the only other character that audience members are coached into caring about.

The way I see it, Slumdog Millionaire took the darker side of India and turned it into a movie that those of us who will plop down money on movie tickets feel good about seeing. At the end of the movie, we feel good because love persevered. Too bad about the blind kid, though–and the brother gone bad did make a bold statement about getting money through organized crime when he arranged himself in a bathtub filled with crisp bills knowing he’d be gunned down in a blood battle.

If I hadn’t lived in India or The Gambia, I might have liked Slumdog Millionaire better. But I feel like it took an outsiders view under the guise of capturing reality. Some might say that the movie showed what poverty is like. Really? Only the beginning scenes showed the closeness and organization that occurs every day in a jugghi colony –the version of poverty I’ve seen–the kind not jazzed up by fantastical events. In my mind, poverty was not the biggest reason the three kids were in jeopardy. Religious unrest and hatred was. That was barely addressed in the movie and was used merely as a vehicle to kill off Mom so the rest of the story could occur.

There were two scenes, though, that felt like perfect pitch. One was at the Taj Mahal. Although it was a volume turned up version, the interaction between westerners who feel guilty about being tourists, and the people who make money off that guilt was fairly accurate in its intention. Still, it was a parody of American tourists. Are we that hapless and clueless? My experience of the Taj Mahal is that, although you might be swarmed by people trying to sell you post cards as you beeline from your vehicle to inside the Taj Mahal complex, in general, you’re not going to be ripped off if you look for official tour guides. The over the top part was the car being stripped. Could it happen? Sure, I suppose. I never heard about it happening though.

The other scene was when the two brothers were being chased by the police when they were young. This was perhaps my favorite scene. What I liked about it was it captured the essence of rambunctious boys and authorities who try to keep them in line. My impression is that this is a cat and mouse game that happens daily with no one getting hurt.

When I saw Slumdog Millionaire, it felt like dining at a huge buffet with every kind of food imaginable, but after the experience, I wasn’t sure exactly what I ate.

Here’s what I think would make for a better movie. Show kids from a jugghi colony that have been cast in a blockbuster movie and what it’s like for them to have this experience, particularly once the cameras have stopped rolling. From what I’ve heard and read, a trust fund has been set up for the children who were cast as the childhood versions of the grown up characters. The kids have also been enrolled in school, but in general, their lives are the same. Tinseltown didn’t change them much. However, they are going to attend the Oscar award ceremony. (See photo of Rubino Ali, the young girl who played Latika in her house in India.) That might change them a bit.

Here’s what I’m wondering. If the kids who are living in poverty are having valuable lives with meaning and depth–which I think they are, and obviously Danny Boyle thought so too since he left the children where he found them, then why is there the notion that in order to solve life’s problems, we need to be millionaires? As much as we were told that the main character didn’t care about the money, then why did he need to win it in the end?

Of course, I was happy he won it. It’s Hollywood. And the dance scene while the credits rolled was excellent.