Close encounters with acute poverty
AT lunchtime, office workers and tourists picnic on the manicured lawns of New Delhi's Jantar Mantar, a celestial observatory built in 1724 by Maharajah Jai Singh II. Its benches, flowerbeds and a huge pink sundial make it a welcome oasis in India's crowded, dusty, jangling capital.
However, if you walk by at night, as I did a few years ago during a visit to New Delhi, the Jantar Mantar is a shockingly different place. It's home to hundreds of pavement dwellers, who camp in crude tents and cook dinner -- if they can get it -- over open fires around the monument. Mothers nurse babies; men smoke; children play in the dirt. All the ordinary activities of family life are carried out on the sidewalk, with no toilets, running water or electricity.
I had to pick my way through the dense encampment, stumbling over makeshift kitchens and bedchambers and through trash. Half-naked children encircled me, asking for change. I clutched my money belt and walked fast. I was sweaty and scared by the time I reached my hotel, where I sat on the terrace and had a gin and tonic, chilling out but hating myself for behaving like an ugly American.
Although I since have had many close encounters with poverty in India, that memory is still as vivid and important to me as my first view of the Himalayas. An inveterate budget traveler at the time, I had chosen to visit the subcontinent as much for its low prices as for its extraordinary sights.
While I nursed my drink under a palm tree, I was forced to recognize that India isn't just a cheap destination but a place where millions of people exist with few of the necessities and none of the conveniences of life as I know it. I had to search my soul to understand the visceral horror I had felt walking among pavement dwellers.
'Afraid of seeing the poor'
"TRAVEL to the developing world is a challenge for many people," Jeff Greenwald, author and executive director of the Ethical Traveler website, told me in a telephone interview. "They are often afraid of seeing the poor. They are afraid that something will be asked of them they can't provide, that their compassion will be tested and found wanting."
Malia Everette, director of San Francisco-based Global Exchange Reality Tours, which mounts visits to more than 30 developing countries a year, thinks travelers generally feel "assaulted" on the first days of their trips. But the point of the tours is to positively influence international affairs by involving Americans with foreign cultures at a grass-roots level. So, groups meet with the poorest of the poor in countries such as Afghanistan, India and South Africa.
