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 Travel & Outdoors | June 2005 
Tourists Pay For 'Reality' Of Poverty
 Mei-Ling Hopgood - The Herald
| | Tours of poor Buenos Aires neighborhoods have brought paying visitors and impoverished residents face to face. |
Buenos Aires - The tour of the poor neighborhood known as Misery Villa No. 20 began just past a steaming pile of garbage as residents sifted through it in hopes of recovering bits of cardboard to resell.
The visitors who strolled casually through the slum's dirt streets saw the carpentry shop where the young and jobless learn to make furniture, and a place across the way where 20 mothers knit sweaters to sell in local markets.
This is Argentina's version of reality tourism - excursions where nonprofit groups, tourist agencies and even governments are increasingly offering tours of places like the poor neighborhoods in Buenos Aires and the favelas in Rio de Janeiro and even the Asian villages devastated by the tsunami last year. Universities and social organizations offer longer, more expensive tours, often focused on particular issues.
"The idea isn't to show off the poverty, but rather the cultural richness here," said Martin Roisi, organizer of the tour of this Buenos Aires neighborhood, one of the slums that outsiders commonly call Villas Miserias - Misery Villas in Spanish - and where even many Argentines would never want or dare to go.
Roisi says the tourists, who are guided by local residents, don't need to worry about their security. "The residents are very warm," he said. "They have a special humor despite all they have to endure."
Many organizers of such tours claim they strive for educational and even international understanding, although some trips are pure money-making ventures. Often, proceeds from the tours go to schools or social programs.
Almost all promise to give tourists the chance to experience the "real" people, places and problems of their vacation spots.
"I felt awkward being in the Villa and taking pictures," said Kelly Phenicie, a New York University student who toured Villa #20 recently. "I felt like I was possibly offending the people. But when all is said and done, I do feel like it's better than not doing it and not knowing about it at all. If people never know that this kind of poverty exists in our own backyard, how will anyone ever be inspired to improve it or make changes?"
In the Argentine capital city of Buenos Aires, villa tours are a new and still relatively rare phenomenon, unlike in Brazil where favela tours have been offered for more than 10 years.
Roisi visited Villa #20 - the neighborhoods are commonly known by numbers - last year while helping during the filming of a movie here. The tour guide, who is not from the villa, befriended residents working security during the filming - who are now his guides.
About 25,000 people live in this 69-acre maze of small, clay-block homes, often with roofs held down by stones. As in other villas, the majority of the residents here are immigrants from Bolivia, Paraguay and other neighboring countries who came seeking jobs.
VILLA HEROES
Poverty, malnutrition and crime are constant worries, but Roisi also tells visitors about villa heroes - soccer hero Diego Maradona was born in one - and their music. The hard-driving "misery cumbia" is a especially popular among young Argentines these days.
Roisi takes visitors to see the businesses and homes, to talk with villa officials and residents. They may even share Argentina's iconic mate tea with the owner of a horse-drawn cart. And they can buy the furniture made at the carpentry shop.
One tour guide, lifelong villa resident Julio Alvarez, 37, is happy to show off the neighborhood's recent economic progress.
He says the government now pays residents $70 to $100 a month to do jobs for the community, such as dig sewers.
Alvarez told a recent tour group that most taxi drivers won't take him home, and sometimes do only after he proves he is not armed. On some tours, he might even talk about the murder of some of his relatives.
But he says he shares his story because he believes the villa tour is an honest job that benefits the community.
"We like that the tourists come and spend money, and Martin helps us." Alvarez said.
$60 TOUR
Roisi charges $60 for the three-hour tour, but he says the money pays for local guides and donations to a local child-feeding center. He takes a maximum of four visitors into the villa, twice a week, in his car. Most visitors are European, and are students, academics or journalists.
"There is no other way to do this," said Roisi, 32, who says he makes money selling other eccentric excursions, including tours of cumbia clubs or the transvestite community.
Roisi said a hotel manager suggested that he rent a minivan and take more guests on the villa tour, but he declined. "I told him that this isn't like going to a zoo. It's going to a neighborhood."
His recent tour ended outside the villa. Alvarez and the visitors had a meal of flank steak or sausage sandwiches and a cola or beer at a roadside grill - the typical lunch of poor laborers.
You may reach Roisi at www.tourexperience.com.ar/ |
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