“I decided to experience the real Jakarta,” said a tourist, stepping gingerly between puddles of putrid water and a scurrying rat in a scene that would never make a postcard.
Rohaizad Abu Bakar, 28, a bank employee from Singapore, said he could not believe his eyes as he wandered around the slum in the Indonesian capital, a jumble of hundreds of shacks, some less than 1m from a railway line.
Nearby, a small girl picked up a discarded juice bottle in search of a sip while a man wearing tattered shorts lay slumped on a dirty old mattress. Only a blue plastic tarpaulin offered shelter from tropical downpours.
Photo: AFP
So-called “poverty tourism” is on the rise in Jakarta.
Organizers said it raises awareness and brings aid to the destitute of the city, but accusations of exploitation are never far away and critics say poverty should not be a tourist attraction.
A few hundred families cram into the slum in the Tanah Abang neighborhood, minutes from gleaming shopping malls where the likes of Gucci and Louis Vuitton compete to lure the newly minted beneficiaries of Indonesia’s economic miracle.
Abu Bakar opted against the picturesque landscapes of other parts of the country to instead join a “Jakarta Hidden Tours” trip, which aims to show visitors the squalid conditions of the nation’s poor.
“Tourists stay in their ghetto. We show what is really Jakarta,” said Ronny Poluan, 59, an Indonesian documentary maker who created the non-profit organization in 2008.
Recent years have seen “poverty tourism” mushroom globally, from the favelas of Brazil to the slums of Dharavi in Mumbai, India, popularized by the film Slumdog Millionaire.
“We have about 10 tours per month, with two to four tourists each time. More and more people are coming, some now even come just for my tour,” Poluan said.
“I’ve had tourists from as far away as Washington. They are not only backpackers, but also businessmen, bankers,” he added, before being cut short by shouting reverberating around the slum.
“Kereta, Kereta” (“a train, a train”) cried mothers rushing to grab children playing on the track as a roaring locomotive approached, whipping up clouds of dust and garbage as it surged toward the flimsy-looking shacks.
The train recently claimed the life of one little girl who died as she ran after her cat.
The slum dwellers, like half of Indonesia, live on less than US$2 per day. Each tourist pays 500,000 rupiah (US$54) to visit, with half of that going to the tour company and the rest funding doctor visits, microfinance projects or community projects such as school building.
“I don’t give cash. I pay the doctors directly for example,” Poluan said.
However, that does not reassure some critics.
“I’m against slums being turned into tourist spots,” Urban Poor Consortium activist Wardah Hafidz said.
“It’s not about shame. People should not be exhibited like monkeys in a zoo,” she said. “What residents get from these tours, in cash or whatever form, only strips them of their dignity and self respect, turning them into mere beggars.”
“They not only become dependent on handouts, but come to expect them. It doesn’t help them to believe they are capable of standing on their own two feet or getting them out of the spiral of poverty,” she added.
Nonetheless, residents say they look forward to the daily influx of foreigners witnessing their lifestyles.
“I like that foreigners want to know about us. It’s good they want to know about us,” said Djoko, a father in his fifties, as he removed labels from a pile of glass and plastic bottles before selling them for recycling.
Tourists deny voyeurism, instead saying that what they witness inspires them to action.
“If I had not seen it, I would not have done anything about it,” said Caroline Bourget, a teacher at Jakarta’s French school.
She is now discussing setting up a mobile school in the slum to give disadvantaged children a better chance in life.
“Here we are at the heart of reality,” she said.
Among the rows of vibrators, rubber torsos and leather harnesses at a Chinese sex toys exhibition in Shanghai this weekend, the beginnings of an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven shift in the industry quietly pulsed. China manufactures about 70 percent of the world’s sex toys, most of it the “hardware” on display at the fair — whether that be technicolor tentacled dildos or hyper-realistic personalized silicone dolls. Yet smart toys have been rising in popularity for some time. Many major European and US brands already offer tech-enhanced products that can enable long-distance love, monitor well-being and even bring people one step closer to
Malaysia’s leader yesterday announced plans to build a massive semiconductor design park, aiming to boost the Southeast Asian nation’s role in the global chip industry. A prominent player in the semiconductor industry for decades, Malaysia accounts for an estimated 13 percent of global back-end manufacturing, according to German tech giant Bosch. Now it wants to go beyond production and emerge as a chip design powerhouse too, Malaysian Prime Minister Anwar Ibrahim said. “I am pleased to announce the largest IC (integrated circuit) Design Park in Southeast Asia, that will house world-class anchor tenants and collaborate with global companies such as Arm [Holdings PLC],”
Sales in the retail, and food and beverage sectors last month continued to rise, increasing 0.7 percent and 13.6 percent respectively from a year earlier, setting record highs for the month of March, the Ministry of Economic Affairs said yesterday. Sales in the wholesale sector also grew last month by 4.6 annually, mainly due to the business opportunities for emerging applications related to artificial intelligence (AI) and high-performance computing technologies, the ministry said in a report. The ministry forecast that retail, and food and beverage sales this month would retain their growth momentum as the former would benefit from Tomb Sweeping Day
Thousands of parents in Singapore are furious after a Cordlife Group Ltd (康盛人生集團), a major operator of cord blood banks in Asia, irreparably damaged their children’s samples through improper handling, with some now pursuing legal action. The ongoing case, one of the worst to hit the largely untested industry, has renewed concerns over companies marketing themselves to anxious parents with mostly unproven assurances. This has implications across the region, given Cordlife’s operations in Hong Kong, Macau, Indonesia, the Philippines and India. The parents paid for years to have their infants’ cord blood stored, with the understanding that the stem cells they contained