“Poverty tourism or poorism, also known as township tourism or slumming [1] is a type of tourism, in which tourists travel to less developed places to observe people living in poverty.[2"] — from Wikipedia

Okay, help me out here, because I don’t know which side of this issue to come down on, if only because it’s totally unclear to me where the line is drawn.

This is really more a question for independent travelers. Tour groups work mightily to steer their charges well away from anything that might be the least bit unpleasant. Some go to the point to creating all-inclusive resorts, gated and guarded compounds reminiscent of those “gated communities” for the über-well-to-do in this country.

Bottom line: If you set out to see the world — the whole world, as opposed to just the United States, Canada and Europe — you are going to encounter poor folks.

The reality is that much of the world, including areas of the greatest natural beauty, also happens to include regions of great poverty. And the farther afield you go, the more poor people you’re likely to encounter and the deeper their poverty is likely to be. That’s a fact.

Depending on where you live, you need not go that far from home — or even leave home — to see your fellow human beings living in desperate coircumstances.

I live a mere 45-minute drive from Tijuana, Mexico. Mother Teresa once said the poverty she saw there was as bad as anything she had encountered in India.

I worked for six years in Tijuana. Take her word for it.

If you live in the rural South, rural portions of the Rust Belt or Appalachia, you don’t have to cross international borders to see people living in heartbreaking conditions. You may not even have to cross county lines.

So what does the conscientious traveler do with these realities?

I’m a big believer in getting to know — and see — the world as it is. If you’re going to do that, you can’t turn away from the poverty or pretend it isn’t there.

At the same time, no human being, no matter their circumstance, wants to feel — or be treated — like a zoo exhibit. A lot of folks in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans have voiced that sentiment after “Katrina tours” became a big business following the 2005 hurricane.

Seriously, I may get a hernia from straddling the fence on this one.

This side of the fence says…the poor have their dignity assaulted enough in their daily lives by circumstances (and other people) right where they live. They probably could do without people traveling thousands of miles and spending thousands of dollars to do the same thing.

There are those who so so far as to suggest that tourism is a vehicle for those in the western or developed world to impose their values or culture or lifestyle on others. I’m tempted to automatically dismiss that as left-wing ranting — until I see McDonald’s everywhere I look.

The other side of the fence says…if gawking at the poor or disaster victims is wrong, is pretending they don’t exist any better?

Take New Orleans. If you think government has thoroughly botched the handling of hurricane relief — and I definitely do — then you WANT people to see for themselves the human price of governmental neglect and indifference.

“Just ignore it and it’ll go away” may well be the most tried — and discredited — problem-solving method in human history.

Beyond our own borders, if you’d like to see your countrymen begin to think of people in the developing world as human beings, rather than just potential targets for some bomb-laden CIA drone, wouldn’t you want them travel to a place where they can get some sense of these human beings as human beings?

Another point: Should travelers deny themselves access to some of the world’s greatest natural beauty because they might run into some poor folks there?

So help a blogger out here, and maybe some of your fellow travelers, as well. If you’ve come to your own definite conclusions on these questions — or have other questions of your own — why not share them in the form of a comment? As long as you keep it clean and respectful of those who might have a view different from yours, nothing is off-limits.

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