I recently got back from India where I was with a team of people interviewing children and their families so we can share their stories and photos with you – Compassion sponsors.

At almost every home we visited, the families were so excited to receive us that they put together mini-feasts. At most homes we were given tea with milk and sugar, and many of them cut fresh coconuts for us, served with straws. I’ve never eaten so many coconuts in my life.

Others would serve us fresh cashews, bananas or pasayam, a sweet cardamom soup. Visiting four families a day, I was more than stuffed and a bit overwhelmed by the generosity. One of these families hadn’t even eaten the day before.  

For the interviews, the children typically put on their best clothes, the outfits they got for Christmas from their sponsors.

They were so proud to look their best for us and for their photo shoot. This was a very big day for them. The neighbors would lean over the fences and stop in the streets trying to figure out what three white people with a boom mic, camera and video camera were doing in that place. It was often hard to interview over the hoots and comments of the neighbors.

We would take their portrait photos in their best outfits, and as we tried to get photos of them doing their typical chores around their house, we would ask them to put on what they might usually wear. They would come proudly out in their second-best outfit.

This was occasionally somewhat humorous. For example, one very sweet, very incredible 14-year-old girl was trying to pump water in her beautiful new and bejeweled salwar kameez she’d gotten for Christmas. The fuchsia scarf kept falling off her and into her bucket, which I could relate to, having unsuccessfully tried to keep my own scarf on all week.

You can see how it might be difficult to get pictures of what a typical scene might look like, with 20 neighbors shuffling in the background and the families in their Sunday finest, some even with special makeup for the day. And how it might be hard to get pictures displaying the need of the family. These families are excited to be profiled, and of course want to put their best foot forward. What girl wouldn’t want to put her best outfit on, rather than her scrubby clothes, for a very exciting international photo shoot?

I bring this up because I sometimes hear, “Those children in Compassion photos don’t look very needy.” And it’s true. Many of the sponsored children stand out among their neighbors. For one thing, they’ve been taught to comb their hair and brush their teeth at the child development center. They’re also potentially the only ones on the block who received a nice new outfit for Christmas.

But besides these obvious differences, the dignity of the child and the family comes first for Compassion. Chuck, the incredible photographer I was with on this trip, respects the 14-year-old girl’s desire to look her best. He doesn’t ask her to please replace her bright new outfit with the older one with holes in it. He captures her beauty and dignity as she would want to be seen by the world.

Hello everyone. My name is Rick Carter, and I work for Compassion in Asia as part of the communications team.

My team is responsible for bringing you the stories that talk about our child development centers in Asia, such as A Day in the Life of a Child Development Center Worker or A New Beginning for Eric, as well as hosting the sponsor tours that visit those same centers. So the fine line between educating the western world about the plight of the poor and exploiting the poor by profiting from their misery is something I have to consider everyday.

Stories like this one, which talk about the reaction of slum residents to Slumdog Millionaire, remind me how important it is for us to be sure that we are maintaining the dignity of our children, their families and their communities as we share their needs with you.

Rather than “shock and awe,” our hope is that our stories and your visits to our child development centers bring you “reality and relationship.” Sometimes the reality is shocking. Our children come from the poorest of poor situations. That is their reality. To get past the shock, we emphasize relationship.

With Compassion tours and visits, we try our best to avoid the “zoo experience” – just looking. We spend time at the child development centers doing activities and interacting with the children to help develop deep relationships.

Getting to know your child through the letters you exchange is so important to understanding his or her reality, but also in seeing them beyond their environment – Compassion-assisted children have hopes and dreams for the future.

I just wrote “Compassion-assisted children” because I realized I have been calling them “our children.” And that’s the key! That’s the way to stay on the right side of that fine line – between education and exploitation.

I know I speak for all of us in Compassion Asia when I say these are our kids and we will treat them as such.

I’ve lived in China for over 15 years. Very little I see in the slums shocks me. But I do still experience awe, and the awe is in how our church partners and you, as sponsors, are helping to lift children out of poverty. Thank you for what you do.

Last weekend I saw the movie Slumdog Millionaire. Have you heard of it? If you haven’t by now, you surely will soon. Just this week it was nominated for several Oscars, including Best Picture. (By the way, in case you were wondering, I think it should win Best Picture.)

Slumdog Millionaire tells the story of Jamal Malik, an orphan from the Mumbai slum who gets a chance to compete on India’s version of TV’s Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (For those of you who are worried about a spoiler, don’t be. In the opening scene you find out that he makes it to the final question.)

Of course he is accused of cheating, as everyone assumes there is no way that someone from the slum could know the answers to so many trivia questions. The movie shows Jamal’s life in a series of flashbacks based on the game show questions, and explains how he knew the answer to each question.

It’s a fascinating concept for a movie. Thought-provoking, funny and often heart-wrenching, it is superbly executed.

Anyway, going into the movie, I had a rough idea of what it was about: a young man from the slums of India. Based on that, I figured that there would be a certain amount of poverty-related imagery. What I didn’t expect, though, was how deeply I was affected by the slum scenes.

Scenes of Jamal’s life reveal abuse, prostitution, drugs, violence … all the circumstances that typically characterize a life in poverty. Though it was a necessary part of the story and none of it was gratuitous, at times it was difficult to watch.

I found myself wondering what others in the theater were thinking. Was this the first time that some people in the theater have seen poverty like that? Did they realize they were seeing reality or did they think it was “Hollywood-ized”? Were they as profoundly affected as I was?

Then today a friend sent me this article about slum tours in India. Apparently the success of the movie has led to an increased interest in the “slum tourism” business in India. People see the movie and then want to see the “real thing.” The article contrasts the movie to the real-life slum tour:

While the show offers Jamal a route out of the gutter, the tour makes a beeline for the squalor from which his real-life equivalents strive to escape: the excursion’s “highlights” include a stop at a stall of six toilets that serves 16,000 people and a stroll alongside a river so black and septic that it oozes rather than flows.

I mean, really?? Ridiculously overcrowded toilet facilities are an “attraction”? I have a hard time accepting that people actually pay to see that.

For those of you who’ve been around here a while, you might remember our previous discussion about poverty tourism. This article showed me how conflicted I still am about this idea.

On the one hand, I think these poverty tourists are despicable for engaging in this overt exploitation of other people’s suffering. On the other hand, they are getting a close-up, powerful (and hopefully life-changing) view of poverty that few get the chance to experience.

So here is a question for you to ponder …

In the case of poverty tourism, does the end justify the means?

In other words, is it worth exploiting the poor in their helpless, and often hopeless, situation if it ultimately changes someone’s heart towards the poor?

I’d really like to hear your thoughts on this one.

You might have read about it in the news.

Companies are now offering poverty tours. Basically, wealthy people can pay money — sometimes a lot of money — to go see what life is like for those living in poverty. One article I read recently calls it “poorism” — a catchy phrase for this idea of visiting a developing country and viewing those living in poverty as a tourist attraction. Poverty tourists go as a group, following a tour guide as though they are seeing a museum exhibit or an attraction at an amusement park. One of the companies, the other article mentions, after a day of viewing poverty even treats the wealthy guests to a gourmet dinner as a culmination of the evening.

Sickening, right?

Yeah, that’s what I thought too. But I very quickly was struck with my seeming hypocrisy.

In thinking about the articles, and what it is about this trend that bothers me so much, I couldn’t help but think about Compassion’s “vision trips” and sponsor tours, both core components of our marketing strategy. How are these any different than what these articles talk about?

Are we, through our exposure trips, simply promoting another form of poverty tourism? We take groups of wealthy people overseas to see the poverty firsthand. Many times on these trips we walk as a group of foreigners through a slum, observing how the poor live. We look at the dilapidated shacks and dusty, rutted roads. We take photos and video of those living in poverty. Yes, we spend time at projects or homes, loving on whatever children might be around. We stop and pray with single moms and overworked fathers. But we are still taking a group of people through the slums for the purpose of exposure. And then at the end of the day, or the end of the trip, we return to our lives of wealth.

So tell me…is what we are doing on our trips different than what I was so quick to condemn in these articles? Is there a difference?

I think there is. That difference is in the answers to two questions:

What is our motivation for going in the first place?
and
What is our response when we get back?

How we answer these two questions makes all the difference between our trips and those mentioned in the articles above. Are our hearts broken into small enough pieces that we come back changed? Do we go back to our lives as they were before, or will we make a profound change because of what we saw? Will we be become a voice for those we saw who are suffering in silence?

If we don’t – if, after exposing ourselves to the poverty and suffering of others, our lives remain the same – that is when it beomes poverty tourism.