The voyeur in us, as poorism unveils

BEFORE I start blabbering, I’m going to come clean. I’m a voyeur. And I believe all of us are, in one way or another, whether we admit it or not.

Living in metropolis Jakarta, the boredom of being society’s mediocre sways me between the comfort of air-conditioned taxis and the heat in the less than a centimeter space between passengers in public buses or minivans. Between glitzy cafes and street-side stalls; between small talks in a socialite party with the crème de la crème on their latest art collection and chats in a narrow alley with kampong children mimicking the Pak Ogah mentality of their older brothers as their way to kill time on school holiday. And to the extreme, it sways me between the comforts of my middle-class rent house and the ground-floored, thatched-walled living space that slum dwellers call home.

And what are my excuses for doing so?

Call it curiosity if you want a positive reasoning. I’ll still call it voyeurism. A free-of-charge escape from being stuck in the middle, with my journalistic profession to justify it.

The latter is what differs me from people lured to hand several dollars from their pockets to take ‘exotic’ city sightseeing that is the Jakarta Hidden Tour. Perhaps like me, they’re just as curious, just as bored, just as stuck in a class that society boxed them in.

Though I can say that I’m just as foreign in my own city, the case rings louder for expatriates who often don’t have the privilege of knowing how to reach different sides of Jakarta. The hidden ones, the tour organizer dubs, despite the realities being in your face day in day out. And we’re still ignoring the obvious language barrier. All of that are the reasons for the being of poorism, a now widely-used term to skeptically refer to activities of taking a tour on the poor side of a city.


A VOYEUR IN HIDDEN JAKARTA
Board the Poorism Enterprise, it’ll take you to places no regular tourists have gone before.

Here’s how it works in Jakarta. Call Ronny Poluan, initiator of the Jakarta Hidden Tour, to arrange a schedule. You’ll see a three-hour trip inside North Jakarta’s Kampung Luar Batang, South Jakarta’s Ciliwung riverbank or Central Jakarta’s railway side kampong of Galur which are listed on the a la carte menu. A full-day tour buffet is within the option if your thirst for adventure is on its peak.

"Please wear sturdy shoes or sandals and not your best clothes. You may find conditions in the communities less pleasant and comfortable than what is usual for you. Gentlemen, please refrain from wearing shorts and singlets. Ladies, please dress modestly," Jakarta Hidden Tour website advises.

No worries, you won’t have to embark the slums directly on your own. We’ll meet in a hotel, a cafe or an office lobby somewhere in Sudirman, Thamrin or Kuningan and from there the adventure begins. For those who still feel any discomfort, the public-bus trip from a meeting point to the slums will serve as some sort of conditioning.

In one session, Ronny took a couple of expatriates working for a development aid agency to the Ciliwung riverbank kampong, meeting the sub-district head, talking with teachers in state elementary school and asking questions to doctors in the community health centers. The two Australian guests eagerly asked for more details on the problems the poor community is facing, problems as basic as the need for clean water, ones they had never encountered in their own country.

At the Sanggar Ciliwung, hearing stories about how members of the local community organize themselves to compost waste and provide non-formal education for the children, the two tour participants appeared even more amazed.

In between serious conversations like the above-mentioned are the exchange of smiles and greetings. And the clicks of pocket cameras of the tour participants.

"Hey, Mister! Mampir sebentar (drop by a minute), Mister!" children exclaims. A mother feeding her baby at a corner smiles proudly as a tour participant caresses her daughter’s hair saying how cute she is. Youngsters slacking in another corner eye the bules from a distance and start giggling.

In those three hours, two worlds intertwine. Both are just as alien to one another. Both are spectacles to the other’s eyes.

And this time it went beyond one’s television screen airing reality shows the kind of Bedah Rumah—a peek into sub-standard decaying shacks that went further to renovating them. I don’t know which inspires which in the case of poorism and reality shows. What I know from seeing people watching Bedah Rumah and people taking the Jakarta Hidden Tour is that both evoke a sense of “poor them, lucky me” thoughts in the minds of the voyeurs. The difference is that the viewers simply keep their thoughts to themselves, while the tourists go into a more interactive level.

Hmm, to think of it perhaps one day game developers will come up with a virtual version of it. You know, something like The Sims taking place in a slum.

In another tour through Kampung Luar Batang, three Australian women spent an hour as guests in the house of a family of four who have lived in the often-flooded area for 22 years.

"One highlight for me was seeing the young girls behaving just the same as my daughter who is the same age —handbags and high shoes ready to go shopping!" said Lani, one of the tour participants. "It was very interesting. There are many ways to see Jakarta, but this tour allows you to go below the surface and meet with people on an equal level that you would not otherwise get to meet as a tourist," she said. "It was refreshing to escape from all the shopping malls."

See? That’s what I was talking about in the beginning. For us—Lani, me and perhaps you—taking a tour on the poor side, is just another form of being curious of the different sides of life. Regardless of whether we do it on our own or through a tour agency. If we want to admit it, seeing those things sometimes make us feel more fortunate than others despite our dissatisfactions with our own lives.

With poorism, curiosities, at least on one part, are answered. The response on the other end varies from a light “it’s rare to see bules here” to an aggressive “don’t invade our space.”

“It’s nice to have them visiting us once in a while. It’s even better if they can help provide what we need,” one Ciliwung kampong dweller comments. “People rarely helps us, so if some bules come here and give us something, why fuss?” says another.

But, not everyone welcomes strangers with a spark of hope in their eyes. KompasDaily quoted a Galur residence as saying “What are they up to here? Don’t make us some kind of spectacle, our lives are hard enough as it is.”

This is where it gets spicy. Everyone involve will always quietly asks “what’s in it for me.”

Proponents say it’s just another way of presenting reality and evoking a sense of social sensitivity among those who rarely—if ever—get a chance to interact with people living in poverty. At least, that’s what the tour organizer poses as a reason for their creative enterprise.

“I just want the kampong people to get a chance of meeting and talking with people that they’d otherwise not meet. And from there, who knows what the tourists can later bring to help the poor,” argues Ronny who runs the tour under his Yayasan Interkultur.

"Many people have never seen what being poor is all about. And this is a way to introduce them to the real world," said Robert Finlayson, an adviser provided by the Volunteering for International Development from Australia (VIDA) to assist the Jakarta Hidden Tour.

Ronny, a documentary-maker, came up with the idea after a friend suggested that he can take what he previously does in kind to a “professional level.” He actually started years ago by taking people, mostly foreign artists, to Jakarta's kampungs—for free, as a friend. One of the results of his tours was Leonard Helmrich's award-winning documentaries Eye of the Day and Shape of the Moon, Ronny said.

Rising to the occasion, Ronny started the program with his wife, charging US$56 for two people to visit one of the sites. The fee can go as high as $330 for a full day tour for four people, visiting all three sites.

A third of the fee goes to paying the guides—who is currently himself, his wife and Robert—, 17 percent goes to Ronny's NGO, 15 percent is given as donations to the families and community organizations they visit and the rest is used to cover tour participants' expenses. But, in a later interview he said that whatever income he earns from each tour is split in half between the organizer and the community.

"I was broke and had to find a way to make a living, one which could hopefully help others," the former documentary filmmaker said of why he started his rather unusual business earlier this year.

His diplomatic yet quite straightforward reply makes me wonder how many broke middle-class would embrace a similar approach in making a business out of poverty. If I were broke, what actually keeps me—or other people—from doing what Ronny does?

I mean, being able to make a living while helping—or simply claiming to help—others sounds wonderful, ain’t it? But, to give it a second thought, no matter how broke I am, I’d probably still won’t be able to look at myself in the mirror knowing that what I do does more harm than good. No, Ronny, I’m not saying this to intentionally offend you. It’s just how I feel about it. All of us are free to make our choices in life, aren’t we?

Critics like Sanggar Ciliwung community leader Sandyawan Sumardi or Urban Poor Consortium activist Wardah Hafidz are concerned with the direct cash-aid method that Ronny opts for, saying it does more harm than good as the poor are thus become dependent on hand-me-downs instead of realizing their own potentials in a more sustainable way.

Macro-economic and development experts have actually been dwelling on this issue for decades. Some take it to the extreme, saying that the idea of development itself had to be pondered upon. What kind of aid can best have a more sustainable impact? If one is so poor and has piled lots of debts—like the case of poor and developing countries in Asia and Africa, how long will a certain amount last to help them get out of their sub-standard living? For me, it’s probably not a matter of how much. It’s simply how.

Setting the debates aside, what the Jakarta Hidden Tour does is indeed as direct as it can be. At the end of each visit during the Ciliwung Tour, for example, Ronny’s wife handed out an envelope with Rp 150,000 inside to the sub-district officer, the teachers at the elementary school and a lady who helped gathered the Ciliwung community together for a meeting with the tourists. The tour organizers’ questions still revolve around how much and not how, though later on Ronny said that part of the money he made had gone to creating a library in the community visited by the tourists.

On a different tour, Ronny’s envelope goes to the hosts that open their homes for a half-an-hour conversation with the unlikely visitors. Opening their homes? Just like that?

Well, privacy, some says, is a privilege. A privilege traded off with the amount of possessions and status one has in a society. I can’t think of any millionaires willing to open their homes for poor to take a peek into, except for perhaps the Kardashians or Paris Hilton. See, there’s no need for actual “tour to the rich’s home”, MTV and E!Channel do it for us. And the countless corny soap-operas portraying the lives of the haves for those who don’t have that much.

Those shows are as if saying “see, the riches also have their problems in life.” Oh, come on, we all do, regardless of how much we have in our wallets and bank accounts. But, then again, the adage “the grass is greener on the other side” is there for a reason. It’s just human to have to compare our lives with others first—be it the more financially fortunate or poor—to be grateful for what we have in life.

Before the era of the middle-class boom, looking up to the haves is the market. Now, in the era of the slum boom, another niche market surfaces.

Nowadays, reality shows like Bedah Rumah actually does the same thing for us, too. The difference is that we can pay for an actual peek with poorism. I still can’t imagine any tours to the house of Jakarta’s socialite. The need for privacy is sometimes shaped that way as the poor who has become the object of poorism feel that it’s still worth it for them to trade off privacy with whatever that can help them make ends meet. Privacy is perhaps the last on their list of needs.

There are more important needs. Surviving marginalization.

And thus some of them don’t mind opening their homes to voyeurs if it can help them survive, since their survival for a long time has been left on their own hands despite the existence of an urban authority.

Slum is more than a phenomenon. It’s a reality, one that authorities everywhere are trying as hard to deal with. Dealing with it comes in different ways, though. Most of the times it boils down to sweeping it under the rug citing limited financial capacity as an excuse.

It’s funny how the authority responds to the poorism phenomenon new to Jakarta. They shunned it for reasons far different from the critics like Sandyawan or Wardah cited. Most recently, the Jakarta authority call it “exposing the dirt of the country,” “creating a bad image for the city’s tourism” and “must be banned.” Modernity, for them, seems to be equal with the image of neat streets and glossy skyscrapers. Thus, anything that does not fit the image is wrong, without them actually trying to deal with the root of the problem.

Well, that’s how we usually deal with something deemed inappropriate. Just ban it!

With all due respect for the urban government, I know it’s not easy to manage a city. Furthermore, a city where gated communities and slums are standing side by side and inequality doesn’t have to be measured by Gini coefficients. But, surely, in a city as complex as Jakarta—or Mumbai, Sao Paolo and Lagos—regulations means nothing without some serious actions.

Poorism is just an indicator. A sound of the alarm that something is not right.


POORISM, A GLOBAL PHENOMENON
Poorism itself is nothing new to the urban dynamics. It’s been there since slums first appeared in the 19th century industrializing England.  Online encyclopedia Wikipedia noted that recreational slumming was popular in Victorian London, where omnibus rides through Whitechapel were in vogue. Similarly, slumming tours were documented through the Five Points slums in Manhattan during the 1840s.

What the 20th century urbanized world sees is just an upscaling of it.

Call it poverty tourism, township tourism, slumming or whatever label one uses, it’s basically a business of taking tourists inside shanty towns, giving a glimpse of what life is like under flyovers, along polluted rivers and inches away from railway tracks.

More than a decade ago, Marcelo Armstrong founded Favela Tour, a company that takes tourists into Rio de Janeiro's favelas or slums. Tourists pay around $35 to take a close look at poverty and learn something about the South American community.

With favelas now as much a tourist commodity as the Brazilian samba, live-in services are sprouting there, offering more than just a couple of hours peeking at poverty. They call it favela chic!

The same can be seen in the Soweto of Johannesburg or Cape Town, along the meandering maze of Mumbai's Dharavi and even in the ghettos in New York City. "Reality Tour", which visits Mumbai's largest slum, claims to be a unique tour and travel agency that tries to help "dispel the negative image that many people have about Dharavi".

What makes Ronny's work different from these others is the end effect it has for the poor.

While critics may lambast the concept of commodifying poverty for tourism, Favela Tour and the tour in Dharavi put the funds toward community activities. The tour companies in Brazil and India manage a community school from the funds they raise from the tours, one thing that the Jakarta Hidden Tour is still far from achieving.

Urban theorists say that city inhabitants should fight for their right to the city. Regardless what their social class is. Silly as it may sounds, poorism is one of its manifestations.

It’s a kind of wicked pun to “a right to the city.” A right to see, feel, and experience—no matter how short—a different side of developing cities that have been swept under the rug. A pile of ‘dirt’ that no matter how hard those who want to rid of it try to disguise will still surface.

Something hidden always sparks curiosity. The curiosity in us, the voyeur in us, help nurture the existence of activities like poorism.

Support it, oppose it, ban it, ignore it, judge it, or even celebrate it (favela chic is just one of the examples). We can choose whatever stance we want on the issue of poorism. But, it’s far more complex than taking a stance when it comes to today’s urban dynamics.

In all its complexity, the world simply boils down to the basic elements of a market: Demand, supply and those with a spark of wicked creativity to benefit from both. Argue as you will, but that helps me partly explain the poorism trend, whatever justification its actors put forth to both supporters and critics.

These days, anything’s a commodity. Sell what others can’t steal from you: yourselves, and anything that comes with it.





ANISSA S. FEBRINA. For the last five years working for The Jakarta Post, she had been using journalism as mere medium—and of course, a justification for her voyeuristic tendencies—to better understand a place she’s in love with: Jakarta. After finishing her masters in Urban Management at TU Berlin, Germany, she feels that it's time to move on. Currently labeling herself a freelancer, she's involved in short-term projects of writing and research still within the urban realm.