Close encounters with acute poverty

AT lunchtime, office workers and tourists picnic on the manicured lawns of New Delhi’s Jantar Mantar, a celestial observatory built in 1724 by Maharajah Jai Singh II. Its benches, flowerbeds and a huge pink sundial make it a welcome oasis in India’s crowded, dusty, jangling capital.

However, if you walk by at night, as I did a few years ago during a visit to New Delhi, the Jantar Mantar is a shockingly different place. It’s home to hundreds of pavement dwellers, who camp in crude tents and cook dinner -- if they can get it -- over open fires around the monument. Mothers nurse babies; men smoke; children play in the dirt. All the ordinary activities of family life are carried out on the sidewalk, with no toilets, running water or electricity.

I had to pick my way through the dense encampment, stumbling over makeshift kitchens and bedchambers and through trash. Half-naked children encircled me, asking for change. I clutched my money belt and walked fast. I was sweaty and scared by the time I reached my hotel, where I sat on the terrace and had a gin and tonic, chilling out but hating myself for behaving like an ugly American.

Although I since have had many close encounters with poverty in India, that memory is still as vivid and important to me as my first view of the Himalayas. An inveterate budget traveler at the time, I had chosen to visit the subcontinent as much for its low prices as for its extraordinary sights.

While I nursed my drink under a palm tree, I was forced to recognize that India isn’t just a cheap destination but a place where millions of people exist with few of the necessities and none of the conveniences of life as I know it. I had to search my soul to understand the visceral horror I had felt walking among pavement dwellers.

‘Afraid of seeing the poor’

“TRAVEL to the developing world is a challenge for many people,” Jeff Greenwald, author and executive director of the Ethical Traveler website, told me in a telephone interview. “They are often afraid of seeing the poor. They are afraid that something will be asked of them they can’t provide, that their compassion will be tested and found wanting.”

Malia Everette, director of San Francisco-based Global Exchange Reality Tours, which mounts visits to more than 30 developing countries a year, thinks travelers generally feel “assaulted” on the first days of their trips. But the point of the tours is to positively influence international affairs by involving Americans with foreign cultures at a grass-roots level. So, groups meet with the poorest of the poor in countries such as Afghanistan, India and South Africa.

“We go and see conditions we don’t want to see. But that’s our world,” Everette said. “The truth is, there is great beauty in the human struggle.”

Julie Bryant of Los Angeles leads teenagers on trips to Belize, where groups work in Anglican schools and churches. “I hope,” she said by e-mail, “to challenge these young people to see the world more intimately by clearing [away] some of the insulation of privilege and comfort.”

Many people are less altruistic about travel, going abroad chiefly for personal enrichment and pleasure. Some who can’t bear to miss the Taj Mahal or Chichen Itza visit India or Mexico in an insulated bubble, spending little on luxury accommodations and taxis. Other compassionate, intelligent, widely traveled people fend off heartbreak by avoiding the Third World, which is understandable.

If I’m brutally frank, I have to ask what good reason there could be for exposing myself to poverty and squalor when the rest of the rich, pristine world beckons. If I contemplate going to Mexico or Thailand, where travelers live well at rock-bottom prices, I have to consider whether I’m an opportunist, taking advantage of hard-pressed economies to get a suntan on a cheap beach.

Faced with such moral dilemmas, I turn to other travelers for practical, convincing answers.

“Some people travel to escape. There’s nothing wrong with that,” Greenwald said. “But those who want to challenge themselves, to immerse themselves in the variety of talent and lifestyles available on this planet, must open themselves up.”

Mike Nelson, widely known as “Mexico” Mike, author of “Live Better South of the Border: Practical Advice for Living and Working,” told me by e-mail: “Any money you bring to a country helps. Whether you spend $50 to $500 a day, it wouldn’t be there if you stayed home. The moral trade-off depends on your attitude.

“What do you leave behind? Money is impersonal. Your interactions with the people are remembered long after the money you spend is gone.”

Anglican trip leader Bryant puts a finer point on the matter. Instead of patronizing more comfortable, international chain lodging and restaurants and other tourist options in Belize, she books with small, local businesses. “I talk with my groups again and again about why we are choosing the frequently less comfortable, locally owned options in order to foster growth rather than exploitation.”

Greenwald advises the same thing. “People wonder how to help,” he said. “Instead of giving to beggars, one way is to patronize local businesses.”

To give or not to give?

INTERESTINGLY, the experts I talked with did not agree on whether it’s wise to give to beggars. Nelson and Antonia Neubauer, president of Nevada-based Myths and Mountains, a tour company that specializes in Asia and South America, think on-the-street charity promotes indigence and truancy among school-age children.

But Michael Stoops, acting executive director of the National Coalition for the Homeless in Washington, D.C., said his organization planned to challenge a recent municipal ruling outlawing panhandling in Atlanta.

“We believe people have a right to ask for money,” Stoops said. “You decide whether or not to give to them.”

In other words, you decide on a case-by-case basis.

You engage and make decisions in a different way when you travel among the poor. You face living conditions that many Americans can hardly imagine. If you let them, those conditions can challenge your most cherished values.

“Despite a lack of the material wealth we so value in the West, many people in developing countries have fulfilling lives,” Greenwald said. “So maybe we’ve missed the boat. Maybe happiness is not about affluence.”

As Myths and Mountains’ Neubauer reminded me, many developing nations have burgeoning middle classes. “In India, poverty is only one piece of the picture,” she said. “But you can’t avoid it because the population is so huge. In America, it’s easier to see only what you want to see.”

I spent a wonderful week in New Orleans several years ago, eating oysters and listening to jazz. Never once did I imagine dire poverty in the shadow of the French Quarter, which Hurricane Katrina exposed.

In Paris, where I live, a recent series of apartment fires killed 48 poor African immigrants, more than half of them children, proving it’s just as easy to remain oblivious to darkness in the City of Light. One of the decrepit buildings where the fires occurred was near the Ritz Hotel, another in the well-heeled Marais district.

If you keep your eyes open, you can’t help but see things no tour company in Calcutta or Paris would care to advertise, things that may depress you or make you wonder. Could it be that pavement dwellers in New Delhi understand life in a way we fail to, a way that makes them richer in non-materialistic ways than we are?

It seems good for those of us blessed with material wealth to remember something the Tibetan holy man said in “Kim,” Rudyard Kipling’s great novel of colonial India: “Just is the wheel.” The aphorism refers to the Buddhist belief that what goes around comes around. Ugly American in this life, pavement dweller in the next.

The two conditions are starkly different but tightly sandwiched, unable to avoid each other in places like India and Mexico, which is, by itself, an excellent reason to go there.

Susan Spano also writes “Postcards From Paris,” which can be read at latimes.com/susanspano.