What is your view on visiting impoverished areas or Slum Tourism?

>>1089964
>Oh look, they have repurposed some old sheet metal to make a home. How quaint.
Probably the same motivation that takes you anywhere else? New experience? People are people.

There you go, mate. I saw one about the slums in Phils. They don't seem to be as dangerous as the favelas, but twice as dirty.

>>1089964
The answer is "real travelers" ie people so obsessed with having a "real" experience by being with "real" people because in their heads only poor people are real yet somehow different from people in their own country

Basically this

You guys can activate the subtitles

https://youtu.be/8NlLQp2xmZ8

I do it. I grew up poor and travelling is a privilege so I often go to ghettos when I'm travelling. I'm also not white + can pass for a lot of different ethnicities... But i usually dress down and leave all my shit. The worst thqt can happen is that they kill me... But that's pretty unlikely, anyway.

I'm also just a genuinely curious person and it's hard for me to say I've seen Manila if I haven't seen the slums.

Spare me the real traveller shit...i also tend to do the most touristic things anywhere I go, too.

>>1089964
As a teenager in the 80s, traveling the world with my parents (airline people), I usually saw the slums from the window of a cab, but not as a curiosity, just a humbling recognition of how some live. Heading in and out of them, say in Mexico City, on the way to Teotihuacan or in the mountains of Guatemala. You see the corrugated metal, lack of screens on windows, lack of concrete floor. Moms that cook on the floor in a little campfire to cook an egg just grabbed from the chicken flapping around in the yard, on a single lump of coal, or some sticks. Walking to some water source to rinse a bowl without the benefit of soap. That kind of thing. Seeing how CLEAN they try to keep their humble abode in the midst of that dirt. Seeing women scrubbing clothes on rocks, all together socializing, rubbing soap bars on fabric pounding out dirt. Rinsing in buckets.
As an adult, traveling to see employees within my company..you'll see this style of living, or only one level better, among employees that have government or what would be middle class jobs elsewhere. City bus drivers for instance come home to their shack at night, on their $100/mo salary, say in the DR. Police can be poorly paid too, in these places. Hurricane code structures, or cisterns to catch water in arid areas is the only improvement to standard of living.
I never saw the slums while in Rio, stayed on the beach and in my hotel. I never would purposefully gawk at how people lived, and I would consider it dangerous, because they know if you are a neighbor or not, and in abject poverty comes drugs, and gang issues. You witness something you shouldn't, then you need to die. Those people have nothing to lose. Friend of mine who has Brazil clients claim that helicopter is how the rich travel home from the airport on purpose now in Rio.

>>1090686
>I'm also not white + can pass for a lot of different ethnicities
I sometimes wish I wasn't white as snow. I suspect it cuts all the "my friend come buy my shit my friend" nagging at least in half.

>>1090739
>I never saw the slums while in Rio, stayed on the beach and in my hotel. I never would purposefully gawk at how people lived

This, basically.

I have nothing against slumdwellers. I think it'd be interesting to spend a while exploring a city without having to worry about safety, but I do not and never have gone out of my way just to see the impoverished. I've seen some rough neighborhoods in Turkey and Colombia and India because I have friends living in those places.

All in all, I think lower-income locales in less developed countries can be exciting places simply because they're so different and often very vibrant. I don't mind visiting when I get the chance, but I don't think I could ever feel comfortable riding around in a bus or car with other relatively affluent white people, snapping pictures or paying money to see squalor.

I'll got slums if I'm invited by a friend or acquaintance or if I otherwise have a good and compelling reason to go.

Cheesy as it sounds, I also think poverty can give you a perspective on your own life and the comforts and opportunities we often take for granted.

I just think, no matter how long we spend in a place or what kinds of neighborhoods we visit, it's important to remember that most of us are quite fortunate. I lived in India for an extended period of time and earned wages which would be considered very low in my home country. I got to experience a certain level of hardship which I wouldn't have had I been on a short trip, but - and it's a big but - I ultimately still had an American passport, an American family, and the means to go back to a wealthy nation whenever I felt I was too low on cash to keep going.

I stayed in a huge Soviet block surrounded by a shanty town in Yerevan, Armenia. One of the houses down in the shanty town looked like a pretty fancy villa though - like it was transplanted out of an affluent neighbourhood into that pit of squalor. I asked my host about it and she said that it was built by a man who grew up in the slum but made money through a restaurant chain. But he was so connected to that shanty town /slum that he had to go back, so that's where he built his villa. It didn't even have large walls or anything, that's how respected he was.

>>1090802
>I just think, no matter how long we spend in a place or what kinds of neighborhoods we visit, it's important to remember that most of us are quite fortunate.
As Warren Buffett said in a speech about how birth is like a lottery in a 6.8billion bucket, his brilliant ability to move money would not have been so fruitful if he had not been born white, male and american but rather a guy in bangladesh.

>>1089964
>zika virus shows up
>they still fuck like rabbits

Brazil sigh...