Quote:

---

Shanty Town for a unique accommodation experience in Bloemfontein


Millions of people are living in informal settlements across South Africa. These settlements consist of thousands of houses also referred to as Shacks, Shantys or Makhukhus. A Shanty usually consists of old corrugated iron sheets or any other waterproof material which is constructed in such a way to form a small "house" or shelter where they make a normal living. A paraffin lamp, candles, a battery operated radio, an outside toilet (also referred to as a long drop) and a drum where they make fire for cooking is normally part of this lifestyle.

Now you can experience staying in a Shanty within the safe environment of a private game reserve. This is the only Shanty Town in the world equipped with under-floor heating and wireless internet access!

The Shanty Town is ideal for team building, braais, fancy theme parties and an experience of a lifetime. Accommodates up to 52 guests. Our Shantys are completely safe and child friendly. http://www.emoya.co.za/p23/accommodation/shanty-town-for-a-unique-acco
mmodation-experience-in-bloemfontein.html

---

Quote:

---

As many as half of that city's 18 million or so residents live in squatter settlements, so there was no shortage of potential venues. But Dharavi, as the largest and most established of Mumbai's slums, was the obvious choice. Way's idea was to showcase the settlement's economic underpinnings in a way that would challenge stereotypes about the poor. "We're trying to dispel the myth that people there sit around doing nothing, that they're criminals," he said after we had walked across the street to his office, a grubby, windowless space barely big enough for his desk and laptop computer. "We show it for what it is—a place where people are working hard, struggling to make a living and doing it in an honest way."

To smooth things out with local bureaucrats and Dharavi residents, Way needed an Indian partner, and he found one in Poojari, now 26, a farmer's son who had migrated to Mumbai as an unaccompanied 12 year old and put himself through night school by working in an office cafeteria. The two men formed a company, Reality Tours & Travel, and bought a pair of air-conditioned SUVs. Way bankrolled the venture with income from rental properties he owns in England. Besides the Dharavi tours—which can be combined with visits to Mumbai's red-light district and Dhobi Ghat, a vast open-air laundry—the company offers sightseeing of a more conventional nature, along with hotel bookings and airport transportation. Way has pledged that once the company starts making a profit, it will donate 80 percent of its slum-tour earnings to a charitable group that works in Dharavi. "I didn't want to make money from the slum tours," he says. "It wouldn't have felt right."

Except on its Web sitem the company does not advertise the slum excursions. But as word has spread over the Internet and by other means, business has grown steadily, drawing visitors from around the world.

Dharavi stretched before us like a vast junkyard, a hodgepodge of brick and concrete tenements roofed with corrugated metal sheets that gleamed dully in the sunshine. Poojari gave us a moment to take it all in. "We'll show you the positive side of a slum," he declared.

In the face of such squalor, his words seemed jarring. But Dharavi's industriousness is well documented. Its businesses manufacture a variety of products—plastics, pottery, bluejeans, leather goods—and generate an estimated $665 million in annual revenue. In other words, Dharavi is not just a slum, it is also a node on the global economy.

Dharavi's industries are arranged geographically, like medieval guilds, and the first alley we visited belonged to recyclers. In one small "godown" (as warehouses are known on the subcontinent), men were disassembling old computer keyboards. In another, men smeared from head to toe in blue ink stripped the casings from used ballpoint pens so they could be melted down and recycled. A few doors down, workers used heavy chains to knock the residue from steel drums that had once contained polyester resin. Poojari told us that some of Dharavi's empty plastic bottles come from as far away as the United Kingdom. "People from a rich family, when they drink from a plastic bottle, they don't know what happens to it afterwards," he said. "Here, you see."

Few of the recyclers wore gloves or other protective gear, despite exposure to solvents and other chemicals that caused my eyes and throat to burn after just a few minutes. The working conditions were typical of Dharavi's unregulated businesses. Some of the worst were in the foundries. From the door of one dark, unventilated space, I watched a heavyset worker dressed in a sarong ladle molten steel into a belt-buckle mold that he held between his feet. His bare feet. After cracking open the mold to reveal the glowing red buckle in its bed of sand, he glanced up, and for a moment our eyes met. His face was wooden, expressionless. I mumbled thanks and moved on.

Not for the first time on the tour, I felt like an interloper, and I wondered how the slum workers and their families felt about white-skinned strangers who showed up to gawk from the threshold. For Dharavi was undeniably grim. As we neared its center, the alleys narrowed and cantilevered balconies closed out the sun, casting everything in a permanent gloom. Children played next to gutters that flowed with human waste, and hollow-eyed men bent nearly double under the weight of burlap-covered loads. But if the people of Dharavi resented us, they kept it to themselves. Some even seemed happy to take part in our education. "Here, everybody is working," a man said genially, and in perfect English, as we paused outside the yogurt-cup recycling operation where he sat sipping tea with the owner.

The welcoming reception probably had something to do with the tour operators, who have cultivated good relations with the slum workers as well as local police. There are, moreover, certain rules. From the door of a one-room garment factory, I spotted a boy who looked to be no more than 8 sitting with other workers at a long table, where he was embroidering fabric with fine gold thread. I nudged my guide: "Ask him how old he is." Poojari shook his head no. Pointed questions were not part of his compact with the slum dwellers.

As it happens, Ellingson and I did not see many child laborers in Dharavi, perhaps because of laws limiting employment of children under 14 or, more likely—as Way suggested later—because they were sequestered out of view. We did see several schools, however, and plenty of kids in uniforms. "By plane you are coming?" one boy asked in English, before declaring, with evident pride, "I'm studying in 8th standard."

Blighted though it was, Dharavi had the feeling of an established community. Signs in Hindi advertised the services of doctors and dentists. An outdoor barber administered a shave with a folding razor. A laundryman stood against an alley wall, pressing clothes with an ancient-looking iron. At a small factory where recycled plastic was melted down and turned into tiny pellets for use by toymakers, the owner, who was in his late 20s, told us that his father had started the business three decades ago. Like many of the slum dwellers, the factory owner was a Muslim, although Dharavi is nothing if not diverse. Its residents come from all over India, and many have lived there for a generation or more. Poojari said that one of the slum neighborhoods is dominated by the descendants of potters from Gujarat state who settled in Dharavi in 1933. When we visited the potters' district in the early afternoon, we were puzzled to find few signs of life, other than smoking kilns and an old man napping on a rope cot. It turned out that most of the potters and their families had taken the afternoon off to attend a wedding.

Ellingson drew a comparison with Palestinian communities he had toured in the West Bank. They were "a lot wealthier, but it's like society has broken down," he said, adding that in Dharavi, "it feels like something is functioning." I had to agree.

For one thing, almost no one asked for money, or even tried to sell me anything. Only once was I approached for a handout, by an elderly woman. That was a big change from Colaba, the main tourist district, where it is difficult to walk more than a few steps without being accosted by a beggar—usually a young woman with an infant on her hip—or a peddler hawking laminated maps. Perhaps people in Dharavi were simply too busy. And some of them clearly had rupees in their pockets. Besides the food stalls and handcarts piled high with okra and squash, there were video parlors showing Bollywood hits, several bars and, on one thoroughfare, a spiffy-looking electronics store plastered with Sony decals.

"They're happy to be here," Poojari said as we paused outside a small factory where women were stitching bluejeans. "They don't want to move out of Dharavi." I don't know about "happy," but on the latter point, Poojari was probably correct. Much more at http://www.smithsonianmag.com/people-places/squalor.html?c=y&story
=fullstory

---