A year ago today, I landed in Mumbai, India’s bustling business capital. I traveled there to spend time with 1298, a for-profit ambulance company that set up operations in response to the city’s lack of emergency care. That’s right, India’s largest commercial center doesn’t have ambulances. Mumbai simply lacks the capacity and resources for such a service. Traveling around the city I could see why.
The “maximum” city, as one writer has dubbed it, *teems* with poverty. Tin siding, blue tarpaulin and decaying wood dot every vantage point, from posh five star hotels to busy roadsides. Restless barefoot children swarm stopped cars and tourists to beg for a Chicklet or a rupee. Homeless men defecate on the street. Mumbai’s poverty is raw and consuming. I found it hard to handle. No surprise then, I turned down an offer to visit Dharavi, the Slumdog Millionaire ghetto, for a “slum tour.”
With all the excitement surrounding poverty alleviation efforts, including microfinance and social entrepreneurship, slum tours have exploded in popularity. This troubles many, including Kenyan native and Echoing Green fellow Kennedy Odede who recently wrote about his aversion in the New York Times.
“Slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from.”
I’m not so sure.
I skipped the Dharavi tour because I couldn’t see how a “slum” was any different than the poverty spread throughout Mumbai. In doing so, I also missed an opportunity, as writer Anand Giridharadas told me, to see promise. (His The ‘Slumdog’ effect: Afflict the comfortable a must read). Slum tours take visitors to see life, not desperation. Yes, life. Isolated from the markets and services available to mainstream society, many entrepreneurial slum dwellers are bring much needed products and services to their communities. Poverty is a condition of being without resources and opportunity – not without talent and dignity.
For decades, Westerners only saw the poor through heart-wrenching images of fly-infested children with bloated bellies. Traveling to the third world amid an East-West divide, civil wars and dictatorial regimes made it impossible for us to actually see or know these children. And that made it impossible to know or understand their plight. All we could do was believe that their lives were – not just worse than ours – but blighted. Hence we helped – out of guilt, not conviction. We opened our purses and wrote checks. Then when our regularly scheduled programming resumed we complained that nothing ever changed with “those people.” They were never real to us.
Today slum tours give depth and humanity to “those people.” These tours show how “those people” are changing their communities – and how we can help them. Contrary to what Odede believes, it moves some to not only start a dialogue and conversation, but also to mentor and invest in these innovators – just ask the Acumen Fund and Vision Spring.
To be fair, Odede’s concern that slum tours are voyeuristic is valid. No doubt there are those for whom it is a selfish exercise, a “look at me, I saved the world” pat on the back. It is improbable, however, that anyone with an ounce of decency could be “entertained” by it. He is also right that slums won’t go away because of these tours alone. Yet, they most certainly won’t go away if we stay out of them.
In a globalized world where the gap between rich and poor is only growing larger; where we are self segregating into communities and networks based on similar values and beliefs, slum tours provide a platform to connect and turn poverty away from being a concept into a reality. In doing so, they also show us that the poor are not helpless. More importantly, they show the poor that they are not alone.
“Please tell them our story,” a Turkish villager in southeastern Anatolia told me on a visit three years ago. “Tell them we are poor but not impoverished. Tell them we are just like you.” Indeed they are – go see for yourself.
Rwanda is on everyone’s mind again. Sixteen years after the country suffered through a civil war and endured the nightmare of a genocide, we’re once again concerned about the tiny east African nation, no bigger than Maryland. This time our 
Barack Obama shocked the Washington foreign policy establishment when, back in 2007, he said, “we’ve got to talk directly to Iran.” It was a policy prescription that beltway insiders may have considered but certainly none openly discussed. To do so would have been “naïve,” which is exactly what then candidate Obama was called.
What’s in a(n American) name?
“The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border…armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship…’Are you a U.S. citizen?’ agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. ’What country were you born in?’”
This comes just a few days after another NYT piece “New Life in U.S. No Longer Means New Name,” pointing out that immigrants to the United States are no longer “Americanizing” their names. At glance these pieces are in contradiction, but upon closer observation they’re connected. Neither is good.
Unlike today’s article, “no new name” was meant to be a feel-good feature demonstrating America’s tolerance and diversity.
Here is why it wasn’t: There is no such thing as an “American” name.
That’s something I learned traveling from Sarajevo to the United States in 2004 when I was asked by a Dutch security official, “Where are you from?”
“I’m American,” I replied.
The tall hazel-eyed Dutchman was not amused. “No, you didn’t understand me, I want to know where you are from,” understanding all too well what he meant.
“Oh, I see, I’m from Brooklyn.” He clenched his jaw and continued to interrogate me about where my family was from, and finally where my name was from. “Your name is not American.” I told him that he was out of line. He nearly hit me. His colleagues restrained him. I broke down in tears.
Letter after letter to Schiphol Airport and the Dutch Foreign Ministry, I demanded an apology – and explanation for such behavior. “Never would I have expected,” I wrote,
“that in such an open and tolerant society (the Netherlands), which values self-determination, civil liberty and democracy, would I encounter such belligerent and horrendous behavior. Questioning my identity as an American because of my name was inappropriate at best. America’s wealth lies in the trove of its unique and diverse citizenship; there is no single definition or profile of an American.”
To which I received this reply:
“One of the signs our agents have been trained to scrutinize, (sic) is the surname of the passenger. Your last name, although in your case belonging to a US citizen, probably has its origin somewhere in the Balkan region.”
Here’s why I wouldn’t accept that response:
“My name originates from Brooklyn, NY…. Bayrasli is every bit as American as Van Buren, Eisenhower, Powell, Chavez, Giuliani or Shinseki. We all carry the same passport, and allegiance to a government that is based on equal rights and equal protection, because our identities originate from a Constitution that knows only values, not ethnicity.”
Here’s why this is important:
We are currently living in a post 9/11, Glenn Beck-restore-honor-to-America-Sarah-“there will be no ground zero mosque” Palin-immigrants-are-not -welcome-in-Arizona world. Anti-immigration and Islamophobia are escalating to the point where dark-skinned men are being violently attacked and some believe that “it is impossible for a Muslim to be a good citizen in America.”
Declaring that people are no longer “Americanizing” their names leads one to believe that a single group defined the American identity – particularly those from that single group. While it may be true that a single group first came to America, they built it so that no single group or single person could dominate it. That, unfortunately, is at risk. Just read the apology I eventually received from Schiphol Airport:
“One of the security measures, regarding U.S. flights, approved by the Dutch Government and the TSA is the procedure of pre-flight questioning, the so called profile check, in which numerous possible signs are listed. One of those signs approved in the procedure, is the surname of the passenger.”
When TSA approves racial profiling; when border patrol agents wake “foreign looking people” to question their citizenship, America’s own name is in jeopardy, not just those of its citizens – new or old. And that’s certainly something to be afraid of.