Category Archives: Travelers' Tales

The “awful French”

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It’s high time we sent this myth into retirement, right alongside “surrender monkey” jokes and “freedom fries.”

You get some interesting reactions when you talk to folks about traveling in France, especially from those who’ve never been there:

“The French are arrogant…they’re rude…they smell bad.”

And my personal favorite: “They hate Americans over there.”

Such statements are usually preceded by the words “I hear” or “I heard.” For me, those words are like the flashing red lights and clanging bell at a railroad crossing, a warning that, like an oncoming train, a load of misinformation is coming.

I’ve been to France about a half-dozen times over the last decade — in Paris, in Lyon in the Provence region to the south and Strasbourg in the Alsace to the east. I’m still waiting for compelling evidence that any of the above three statements — especially that last one about the French hating Americans, is true.

WHERE’S THE HATE?
And no, you will not be treated like an attacking Martian if you don’t speak French.

In the hundreds of interactions that I and my deplorable “francais” have had with the French people over the past ten years, there has been exactly one rude episode. One. That was with a woman running a candy shop in Strasbourg during the Christmas market season. Even her own daughter seemed appalled by her mother’s behavior.

And when we mentioned the incident in passing to a Christmas market vendor setting up his stall the next morning, he gave us a pretzel the size of a catcher’s mitt to make up for it.

I’m not that crazy about pretzels, anyway, but that’s not the point. He didn’t have to do that.

All over Paris, and everywhere else in France that we’ve been so far, we have been met with smiles, kindness, patience.

THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
Like the hotel clerk in Lyon who found us a room in her totally booked hotel after Expedia had botched our reservations — and then bought us a box of the most incredible liqueur-filled chocolate to thank us for our patience.

Like the crepe vendor outside the St. Germain de Pres church who gave us a verbal guided tour of the 6th arrondissement in the three minutes it took him to make two crepes.

Like the cafe owner in the 11th arr. who turned us on to the most incredible wine from, of all places, Algeria.

So where are all these American-hating French I keep hearing about? Hiding under the glass pyramid at the Louvre?

Given the number of Americans, black Americans in particular, who have left the United States to live and work in Paris alone, they couldn’t hate us all that much.

SMOKE GETS IN YOUR EYES
Indeed, Paris has been something of a magnet for American expatriates since the end of World War 1, to the point that an entire American community has taken root there, much of it scattered through the city’s western suburbs. That community may number as many as 50,000 people.

The only consistent negative I’ve ever encountered in France, other than Paris traffic, is the French tendency to smoke. At times, they seem to smoke like chimneys.

When the French government banned smoking in most public places, the smokers simply moved to the outdoor tables of their favorite bistros and cafes. There, they continue to generate clouds of cigarette smoke thick enough to hide an elephant.

Not just any old tobacco smoke, either, but the acrid, penetrating smoke of French cigarettes like Gaulloise, which could easily substitute for tear gas. Perhaps the reason the French so objected to our invasion of Iraq was because they knew where the weapons of mass destruction really were.

In their pockets.

MYTHS AND OTHER BAGGAGE
But wading through the occasional smokescreen is a small price to pay to see one of the most physically and culturally diverse — and most beautiful — countries in the world. Especially one that holds such a place in our own history, literally from its founding.

There’s a reason why France is the most visited country on Earth. Actually, there’s a long list of reasons — gorgeous, varied countryside, one of the world’s great capitals, food, fashion, music, history, thriving cultures from around the world.

Any one of those reasons might well resonate with you. You might even discover one of your own.

Once you get past all the urban mythology, that is.

In travel, as in life, you pretty much find what you’re looking for. If you go looking for the negative, looking for the worst in people, you can find it. Actually, if you carry negativity, stereotypes and “attitude” with you when you travel, “it” may well find you first.

Leaving that “baggage” at home is the first key to enjoying a visit to France — or anywhere else.

The Tijuana Jail

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The holding cells that served as a legendary hellhole for unlucky tourists may soon take on a new role — tourist attraction.

According to the newspapers in Baja California, the Tijuana municipal police headquarters known as La Ocho is finally being closed after 60 years in operation, at the end of this month.

To Tijuana residents and old gringo Baja hands alike, that news is likely to be met with a mix of chuckles and shouts of “good riddance!”

This also was the municipal jail, which would “host” generations of drunken sailors, wayward teenagers and tourists who simply crossed paths with a crooked muni cop looking for a bribe. It was where you would be held until you were brought before a judge — or until you paid up, whichever came first.

On this side of the border, La Ocho was immortalized by the Kingston Trio in their 1959 folk song “The Tijuana Jail:”

“So here we are, in the Tia-juana Jail.
Ain’t got no friends to go our bail.
So here we’ll stay, ’cause we can’t pay.
Just send our mail to the Tia-juana Jail.”

The song made the place sound like a joke. The reality, as indicated by the Baja California newspaper El Norte, was anything but:

“Known as La Ocho for being located on Eighth Street, it was the place where citizens and foreigners alike knew the rigors of corruption and confinement for infractions as light as traffic violations…Through this headquarters passed hundreds of people who had the misfortune to face its justice and injustice, from dangerous hitmen to juvenile offenders or gang members known in the 1950s as ‘pachucos.’ ”

Back in the 1970s, enterprising merchants in San Diego were hawking T-shirts that read: “I survived Tijuana Jail.” For most of its history, enduring La Ocho and its dank, fetid conditions could be considered a minor achievement.

Tijuana mayor Jorge Ramos told El Norte that the old police complex would be converted into a cultural and historical center, but offered no details.

THE SAME, BUT DIFFERENT
Tijuana muni police were long infamous for bribery and extortion. They called it “la mordida,” the bite — and they wouldn’t hesitate to put the bite on you.

This is what happens when you make less in a month as a cop than what a teenager at Mickey D’s makes in a week.

Back in the day one Saturday afternoon, four of us were at an intersection in downtown TJ when a muni cop standing on the corner waved at me to turn left, pull up to him and stop.

“Good afternoon, señor,” he said in his courteous English. “I’m going to give you a ticket.”

“What for?”

“For making an illegal left turn!”

Ignoring for the moment that I never would’ve turned in the first place had he not told me to, I asked him what made the turn illegal. He couldn’t tell me, but insisted that it was. He took my driver’s license and asked a bunch of questions — where was I from, who was in the car. Typical cop stuff.

Then, incredibly, he let me go. To this day, I still don’t know why. Instead, he sent me off with a smile, and a warning:

“Now remember, Señor Gross: In Mexico, the rules are the same…but different!”

— Greg Gross

TRACY GROSS: Vietnam on two wheels, Part 1

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Vietnam riders

Vietnam tour riders. Tracy Gross, right.

By TRACY GROSS
Which was more fascinating — the sight of Vietnam to me, or the sight of me on a motorcycle to the Vietnamese? Call it a tossup.

We picked out our hired motorcycle at a makeshift garage on the edge of Saigon, housed under a cinema which was showing Big Momma’s House 2. Martin Laurence in all his Big Momma fat suit glory beamed down upon us as we assembled our caravan.

Our chosen bike was a Honda Steed. The other bikes were late-model Indians and some other Japanese models, plastered with decals making them look like Harley-Davidsons, which weren’t officially allowed in the country.

Since almost everybody in Vietnam travels on two wheels — bicycles, rickshaws, mopeds or motorcycles — it was not unusual to see five or six people riding piggyback on the family scooter. Full-blown motorcycles were strictly limited to government-controlled Motor Bike Clubs.

To legally ride a bike with an engine bigger than 155cc, you had to be a Vietnamese citizen with a Vietnamese driver’s license, or in some cases, both a Vietnamese and an international driver’s license, and pass the local driving test. To get around this, our tour rented personal bikes from a private Motorcycle Club and were made honorary members, with the bonus of real members riding with us as tour leaders and mechanics.

Vietnamese women seemed to be obsessed with not letting their skin darken under the blazing tropical sun. They wore wide-brimmed sun hats, goggles, silk gloves and face masks, anything to avoid tanning — even in 90-plus degree heat. Repeatedly, mothers pointed out my dark skin to their children, no doubt to warn them that this is what would happen if they didn’t cover up.

Helmets were not yet mandatory. I saw women on motorcycles wearing everything from platform heels to flip-flops.

Being about six times the girth of the average Vietnamese (male or female ) made for even more specialized roadside sales pitches. I was harangued with “we have your size, big Western woman!,” “special sale for middle-aged big big size woman!”

“How many children do you have?,” “how much do you weigh?” and “how old are you?” were common greetings.

COUNTING COLORED PEOPLE
Most Vietnamese I encountered had never seen a Black person, not even in the media. Depictions of foreigners, Black or otherwise, were relatively stereotyped, if not comedic. Hotels and more affluent Vietnamese seemed to have access to satellite broadcasts bringing in Western-produced programs such as CNN, HBO and MTV Asia.

The one Black woman I glimpsed on hotel TV was Raven-Symoné on the Disney Channel’s “That’s So Raven.”

Beyond my dark skin, my braided hairstyle fascinated people. Young girls followed me, daring each other to pull my hair and play with the beads on the ends. In truth, so different was I in shape, color and proportion that I must have seemed like a space creature.

Evidently there exists a country folk legend of an evil giantess used to make toddlers go to bed. It is said that she is very dark-skinned and has a hunger for disobedient children.

To the average Vietnamese four-year-old, I must have fit the bill. I actually scared small children in remote more rural areas.

My fellow travelers recognized my discomfort and went out of their way to help me spot other colored travelers. Throughout our month-long visit, the total persons of color, including myself, totaled five: A retired army sergeant, retracing his tour of duty with his Puerto Rican wife, one French-African woman taking an adjacent boat tour in Ha Long Bay, four East Indian engineering students in Sapa.

But my all-time favorite was the beautiful Nubian dancing “girl” in the Hanoi market who turned out to be a Filipino transvestite.

RIDING INTO THE DELTAS
Our first inland stop from Saigon was the city of My Tho. My Tho is the main port to the four major islands in the Tien River. These islands were named as physical embodiments of the four primary beasts of Vietnamese mythology: Dragon, Tortoise,Phoenix, and Unicorn.

Our destination was Unicorn Island, in the absolute heart of the delta. The Tien is a tributary of the mighty Mekong River. Named one of the world’s twelve largest rivers, the Mekong is known as the dragon with nine mouths. For the Vietnamese, the Mekong exists like the mighty Mississippi for Black Southerners: a lifeline, a spiritual plane and a haunting reminder of past struggles.

Boarding the Mekong ferry was like being poured through a funnel. We never dismounted and when the gates opened, we rode straight off the boat onto the opposite dock.

Unicorn Island was quite kitschy. There was a petting zoo, complete with a boa constrictor and mannequin Viet Cong soldiers offered as photo opportunities. This area is what most Americans tend to associate with the Vietnam War (or the American War as it is called here).

We took a photographic “Apocalypse Now” sampan tour down river. Sampans are still widely used by rural residents for fishing, general transportation — or like this, as cheap cruisers on the waterways. The next morning, we took a larger boat further into the islands for a home-stay with a local family.

Vietnamese is a tonal language and the phonetics of the family names and products all lent themselves way too easily to innuendo in American English. For example, Hung Phat is a popular brand name distributor for tea and energy drinks.

Much of the community was housed in the heart of the flood plain and the homes were elevated on stilts to avoid being washed away. At key crossing points, the islands were connected by “monkey bridges” basic arches over the canals, built of bamboo or uneven logs.

The government is phasing out most of these houses. The state was building a series of mortar overpasses along the coastline to the inland rivers, and residents of the poorer wooden-stilt homes were being relocated into concrete apartments.

Sadly, it seems that gentrification is a universal concept.

The next afternoon, we rode to the infamous Cu Chi tunnels. Dug over a period of twenty five years, this warren of tunnels begun by the Viet Minh when they were fighting the French in 1948 were expanded to a remarkable 124-mile network used by the Viet Cong literally underneath the American military. The tunnels are both and a testament to Vietnamese tenacity. Two main sections were open to visitors.

Tunnel 1 had been widened to accommodate western body sizes. And we were encouraged to fire heavy weapons at Cu Chi Tunnel 2. The cost: one US dollar per round.

NEXT: Heading north


Images by T. Gross & M. Small. All rights reserved.

Blueprint for Evil

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You know about Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald. This place was the blueprint for them all.

Sachsenhausen is in the town of Oranienburg, a nice 45-minute country drive north of Berlin. But the pleasant rural surroundings do little to mask the ugly past of this place.

Heinrich Himmler ran the entire Nazi concentration camp system from Oranienburg, and Sachsenhausen was his testbed.

Opened in 1936, it was the first Nazi facility purpose-built as a concentration camp, the prototype for Auschwitz, Dachau and all the rest.

The SS camp guards for all the other camps were trained here. The sarcastic motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” — Work Makes You Free — was adopted systemwide after first appearing on Sachsenhausen’s main gate.

We Americans didn’t hear much about Sachsenhausen, mainly because throughout the Cold War, it was in what was then East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain. But nothing happened in any camp that didn’t that didn’t happen here first.

In a very real sense, this was the cradle of Nazi genocide.

The route from Berlin to Sachsenhausen is lined with cool, green forests and picturesque country homes of two and three stories, with steeply angled tile roofs to shed rain and snow. The camp itself lies at the end of a pleasant little residential street.

None of that prepares you for what awaits at the end of that street.

A sprawling triangular complex of about a thousand acres, Sachsenhausen is defined by a perimeter wall interspersed with guard towers. At its height, there were 68 long, one-story barracks, laid out in a fan pattern.

That triangular layout allowed the camp to be controlled by a minimum number of guards. The main gate stood at the apex of that triangle. Above it, a single heavy machine gun could “sweep” the entire camp grounds.

The machine gun is gone, but the gate is still here.

A handful of those barracks also remain — including the two where medical experiments were conducted on inmates — along with the “execution trench” and a portion of the inner-perimeter death strip that includes a once-electrified fence.

In front of the fence and the barbed wire is a single strand of bare wire running about a foot above the ground. This is a “dead man’s wire” and its meaning is clear: Step over this and you will be shot.

You could be beaten to death for not moving fast enough. Starved and brutalized for months and then years, inmates sometimes dropped dead during roll call.

Two holes in the ground served as mounts for a simple, inefficient gallows. The condemned were left to slowly strangle in the noose, hanged by their friends at the orders of guards.

In December, a Christmas tree went up in place of the gallows.

DEATH BY “SCIENCE”
Doctors here injected Jewish children as young as 11 with the incurable hepatitis C. They stitched moldy hay into prisoners’ flesh to “study” gangrene. They made masks of inmates faces, copies of their eyes.

In addition to Jews, they seemed to have a special “fascination” with the Roma, as seen here.

Periodically, a Nazi psychologist visited Sachsenhausen to select inmates to send to the death camps, which he did as cheerfully as if he were delivering milk.

The cruelty wasn’t limited to physical brutality or scientific sadism.

The SS officers treated themselves to lavish banquets, which they made their starving prisoners serve them. They made prisoners hang other inmates for breaking camp rules. They told new arrivals that their path to freedom ran through the chimneys of the camp’s “special” ovens.

They seemed to think that was funny.

The inmates were marched through Oranienburg into the camp. Nazi authorities encouraged the residents to come out and jeer and throw things at them along the way. It grew to be such a farce that even the SS got tired of it, and started bringing them in at night through a back gate.

SECRET SHAME, SILENT SCREAMS
In April 1945, as Germany crumbled, the Sachsenhausen guards tried to march 33,000 inmates away from potential salvation. Those too weak or sick to keep up were beaten or shot — or just died where they fell.

Thousands of them.

When the Red Army finally overran the camp, they found 3,000 inmates, barely alive, and nearly 13,000 bodies. That should’ve closed the book on Sachsenhausen.

It didn’t. The Soviet NKVD turned it into one of their “special camps,” where they imprisoned Nazis, Red Army deserters or soldiers who caught venereal diseases from women in occupied Germany.

By the time the place closed for good in 1950, at least another 12,000 people had died here. They’re still here, buried in mass graves.

Overall, no one really knows how many died in Sachsenhausen. Guesses range from 30,000 to as many as 100,000 — minus however many died on the death march.

In place of the old horrors is a sprawling emptiness and a bottomless silence, barely disturbed by the murmurs of visitors and the wind that sweeps across the grounds. You leave here feeling as if you’ve looked Evil in the face, and you leave forever changed.

In Sachsenhausen, silence is a scream that never ends.

The Godfather in London

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The man I call the Godfather of Travel, Arthur Frommer, just returned from London, and blogged about it.

Being away too long from London is something we have in common, and I’m still overdue for a return visit.

“I firmly believe that every human being should go there at least yearly,” he wrote. And I couldn’t agree more.

This is one of those places that cuts the cutting edge. Everything and everyone from everywhere. Food, clubs, music, architecture, a legion of cultures from around the world — if you can’t find it in London, it may not be worth being found.

If you told me boredom was illegal here, I’d have no trouble believing it.

In short, London has the power to overload every sense you own, including your sense of time. In those moments when you’re caught up in the city’s electric energy and youthful, multicultural vibe, it can startle you to realize that Roman legions once marched on some of these same streets.

Mentally, I am somewhere over the Atlantic, heading east. You should be, too.

Physically.

One man, one world, no bags

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And no, the ones under his eyes don’t count!

We told you in last week’s Sunday Travel Digest about Rolf Potts, writer and traveler, who’s doing a ’round-the-world trip with no bags. Not non checked bags. Not no carry-on bags. Not so much as a fanny pack. No bags, period.

Airlines must really, really hate this guy…

If you’d like to join him vicariously on his bagless venture, follow him on his blog.

Just be sure not to bring a bag with you.

The Green Book

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A country without a memory
is a country of madmen.
— George Santayana, 1863 − 1962

The New York Times evoked a memory recently with a story about the Green Book, published between 1936 and 1964 by Harlem’s Victor H. Green.

To really understand it, you need its full title: “The Negro Motorist Green Book: An International Travel Guide.” It was a guide to lodgings, restaurants, gas stations, barbershops and so on, where blacks were welcome.

All those great AAA guidebooks didn’t cover this America, so Victor Green did.

To read the entire New York Times story, click here.

This wasn’t a political statement. It was about avoiding the humiliation of being told — often in the most hurtful language possible — that “your kind” wasn’t welcome.

Sometimes, the stakes were higher, and meaner, than that. So you took precautions.

MILES AND MILES TO GO
You kept your fuel tank full, just in case. You packed an ice chest with soft drinks and sandwiches, in case you couldn’t find an eatery. And if you pulled into a town that didn’t “feel” right,” you just kept going — no matter how tired or hungry you were. Even if it meant driving all night.

Was this dangerous? Yes. But maybe not as dangerous as stopping.

Even if you didn’t have the Green Book — you had your own list of folks who could put you up. Where you didn’t know anyone, you knew to locate “your” side of town. Once there, you’d find some little cafe or shop, and start asking around.

There was no need to ask where the black part of town was. You had only to ask “Where can we get something to eat?” or “Where can we find a room for the night?” — with a little added inflection on the “we.”

The answer might come politely or it might come rudely, but it always came.

Someone would point you to a motel, or just point you to a neighborhood where you might run into someone who might let you spend the night on their couch — or on the floor if the couch was too short. Maybe even throw in a meal or two.

Sometimes, there was no need to find the black folks in town. They would find you.

AN ACCIDENTAL MEETING
While en route to Chicago in 1966, my family’s Buick collided head-on with a Pontiac on a lonely two-lane Wyoming highway. One person was killed. The nearest hospital was 100 miles away, in Laramie.

There were less than a dozen black folks in Laramie back then. Nearly all of them found their way to the hospital. They kept us company, answered our questions, told us where we could find what and who would be willing to do what for “us.”

Above all, they made sure that we knew we were not alone in Laramie.

They became our Green Book.

Victor Green’s paperback has been rendered obsolete by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But it is as much a part or our national travel heritage as the Chisholm Trail, the Natchez Trace or Route 66.

For more details about the Green Book, you might enjoy reading the Perceptive Travel blog.

Surviving copies exist at the National Civil Rights Museum, in Memphis, TN, and at the newly opened International Civil Rights Center & Museum in Greensboro, NC.

POSTSCRIPT
Thank to IBIT friend Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, I’ve just learned that the Green Book has been digitally scanned by the South Carolina Digital Library, which means you can view its contents online.

Many thanks, Kaetrena!

OUT THERE: Try Anything Once

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One of an occasional series introducing black travelers and their Web sites

SITE: Try Anything Once

This blogging sister has a split-personality passion — half-foodie, half traveler. And she’s perfectly positioned to pursue both.

For one thing, she’s in New York. How can you not be a foodie in New York? That’s like saying “I live in the desert because I don’t like sand.” Virtually every cuisine in the world — and I mean the world — is there. You could vicariously travel the globe just going from one resto and cafe to another.

And that’s just in Manhattan.

And for another, she likes to travel. Her most recent trip was to Bali, in Indonesia, both truly exotic locale guaranteed to both appetites.

She describes herself thus:

“I am wanna-be, sorta kinda foodie who’s not really sure she’s a “foodie” who also happens to love to travel. Makes lots of sense, huh?”

Actually, it does.

Warning: Don’t read this site when you’re hungry. By the time you get through eying the delectable dishes she posts on her blog, you may find yourself gnawing on your monitor.

Let’s welcome this sister to the IBIT family — and make sure to check out her blog!

The Best Souvenirs are Us

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The human connections we make when we travel through the world can do more to make a journey memorable than a thousand five-star hotels.

My taste in travel memorabilia constantly evolves.

I started out collecting insignia and patches from everywhere. Even friends brought them back for me. The plan was to frame them and hang them on the walls in my house.

They’re still here, tied up in a plastic grocery bag stashed in the corner of some closet.

After that, it was T-shirts, then postcards, then photographs, then pens. Ehhh!

So I started thinking: Of all the travelers I’ve known, who always came back with the coolest souvenirs? That took me back a couple of decades, straight to a young Czech journalist named Petr.

Petr was traveling the world back then, and San Diego was one of his stops. Being young and anything but rich, Petr hardly traveled in five-star style, but I doubt he would’ve done so, anyway.

MAKING CONNECTIONS
He had no qualms about going from Here to There on the oldest, rustiest, smoke-belchingest buses you could imagine, complete with the cliché chickens and other livestock. But more than that, he saw absolutely no reason to avoid contact with strangers, regardless of where he was in the world.

If anything, he worked at connecting with people.

He’d look for an occupied table that still had an empty seat and ask to join the other diners. He never seemed to meet a language barrier he couldn’t hurdle. Whenever he talked about his travels, it was the people he’d met who were his fondest memories.

No stranger in Petr’s presence was ever a stranger for very long. He seemed to have at least one friend everywhere except Greenland.

What I realize only now is that young Petr was teaching me about travel. It’s not about all the wondrous sights, the number of stamps in our passports or thread count in the sheets of our hotel beds.

And it certainly isn’t all that “stuff” we bring back. You know, all those genuine souvenirs from all over the world — made in China?

It’s about all the incredible people we meet along the way.

The young Japanese woman who traveled for two hours on a train to Tokyo, just so she could guide a couple of American strangers to an obscure shop that sold the most incredible black pearls.. The Japanese kids dying to try out their classroom English who led us to a bangin’ jazz club off the Ginza that we never would’ve found on our own.

The 90something Negro Leagues legend you bump into in Kansas City, who slows his roll through a museum long enough to share a laugh — and flirt with a woman almost half his age.

THE SAME, BUT NOT
The endless stream of cabbies who shared a slice of themselves and their countries in the time it took to get from the hotel to the airport, or the unsolicited suggestions that turned what would’ve been a good trip into something unforgettable.

The Londoners who shared their soccer expertise and passion in the airport lounge while we watched the World Cup final together.

Or the Tijuana policeman who changed his mind about giving me a bogus traffic ticket and instead gave me a priceless one-line introduction to his country:

“Now remember, señor, in Mexico, the rules are the same — but different!”

No, the biggest thing we get out of travel is a better understanding of the guy who lives on the other side of the state, the county, the continent, the world. What I can share with him — and more important — what I can learn from him.

To make a friend in another part of the world is worth a thousand five-star hotels.

Breaking through barriers of etiquette and overcoming fears about safety can be tricky just leaving town, much less leaving the country. For women travelers, especially those traveling alone, it gets trickier still. But Petr’s great, long-delayed lesson to me was: It’s always worth the effort.

On this journey through life and around this planet, our best souvenirs, by far, are one another.

Slum tourism: The Other Side of the Lens

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The subject of slum tourism has at least one thing in common with the crushing, appalling poverty that the slum tourists pay to gawk at.

Neither is going away.

The latest to weigh in on this subject, courtesy of the New York Times, is Kennedy Odede, executive director of the Shining Hope for Communities organization in Nairobi, Kenya.

Like many before him, he rips the whole notion of other people’s poverty as a tourist attraction. But unlike sanctimonious pontificators like me, Mr. Odede comes at this from a unique perspective.

He’s has actually served, reluctantly, as one of the “attractions:”

”I was 16 when I first saw a slum tour. I was outside my 100-square-foot house washing dishes, looking at the utensils with longing because I hadn’t eaten in two days. Suddenly a white woman was taking my picture. I felt like a tiger in a cage. Before I could say anything, she had moved on.”

Read the entire text of Mr. Odede’s opinion piece here.

There are some of us, born to a life of paved streets, flush toilets, indoor water taps and electricity, who seem to think that human dignity depends on how much money you make. It doesn’t.

At the same time, I have witnessed the other side of Mr. Odede’s humiliating coin, namely the indifference of tourists from developed countries to the tragically horrid living conditions of their fellow human beings. And I’ve seen it right here in San Diego.

Long before Mexico’s drug violence prompted gringo tourists to stay away, there were hordes of San Diego-area residents who wouldn’t dream of setting foot across the border in Baja California, particularly in the city of Tijuana.

Why? Because they couldn’t stand to see all that grim, soul-crushing poverty staring down on them from the hills above. How do I know? Because they said so — always freely, often unprompted and many, many times.

I get no joy out of witnessing anyone’s poverty, either. But somehow, that attitude struck me as indifference of the ugliest sort, as if their living conditions made the people living in those hills a lesser form of humanity.

Mr. Odede’s message about slum tourism — or “poorism,” as it’s sometimes called — is painful, powerful and on-point. But like poorism itself, it falls short of what is needed.

Coming away from scenes like those in Tijuana, Mumbai or Kibera can leave even the best-intended person feeling utterly overwhelmed — to the point of paralysis. I have no doubt that there are at least some slum tourists of genuine goodwill, but those who are willing to act on what they see they need a venue, encouragement and proper guidance on how to do it.

One thing that might help would be if more such tourists could connect with the people whose communities they’re touring, talk to them — or better still, listen to them — before they start snapping pics or shooting video. First, form that human bond.

Few such tours make that possible. That being the case, what realistically can we expect from even the most well-meaning slum tourist?

I should probably make it clear that I don’t have a dog in this fight. I don’t operate a slum tour anywhere on the planet and would never want to. Still, I can’t help but feel that both sides can, and ultimately must, do better.

If it is not enough for the slum tourist to feel he’s “done his bit” by paying to see someone else’s poverty, neither is it enough to condemn the slum tourist without giving him a viable means to help change the image he’s just seen.

Where poorism is concerned, those on both sides of the lens need to “come correct.”

To see what we’ve done on this subject before, click here.