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Theme park sanitizes global poverty

Visitors Ron and Dolores Smith, at right, from Knoxville, Georgia, are shown round the "slums" of the Global Village and Discovery Center by volunteer Tammia Bartlett. PHOTO: NY TIMES

Under a sapping Georgia sun on June 5, Tammia Bartlett, a volunteer tour guide in a turquoise polo shirt, led a small group of visitors toward a mass of dilapidated shacks made of rusty tin and scrap wood. It was two days before the grand opening of a new and unlikely tourist attraction, and Bartlett, a college student from South Africa, was refining her spiel.

"Now we're entering our slum village," she told the group.

The roughly 30 shacks, some papered with magazine pages or decorated with battered hubcaps, are re-creations of poor living conditions in Africa, Asia and Central America, rendered by Habitat for Humanity International, the nondenominational Christian ministry that helps build low-cost housing in 89 countries.

"It's a before and after of poverty housing," said Millard Fuller, president and founder of the organization.

An experiment in combining tourism, social activism and promotion, the 2.6 hectare park, the Global Village and Discovery Center, officially opens on Saturday. After walking through the slums, visitors will tour model houses of the sort the organization builds in various parts of the world. Fuller said he expects 50,000 to 70,000 visitors a year.

At a certain point we had to stop making it [the park] too realistic. We can't have stagnant water and naked children running around. -- Dick Koegeman, executive director of Global Village and Discovery Center

Last week, as volunteers and staff put the finishing touches on the poverty village and 12 model homes, a few visitors toured the grounds. Tarpaper hung from the walls of one shack; another used a dented car hood as an awning. A jumble of tires and debris were stacked between two small buildings.

A visiting couple, Jack and Anita Snell, nodded approvingly at the slum dwellings, but had one cavil. "You need a polluted ditch running through," said Snell, 62, who works with abject poor communities throughout Asia for the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship. On second thought, Snell added, "I was wondering if you want to add smells, to make it more realistic."

Dick Koegeman, the executive director of the Global Village and Discovery Center, said the builders tried to walk a careful line. "We had to make sure it didn't look too nice, but it also had to be safe," said Koegeman, whose background is in the theme park industry. "At a certain point we had to stop making it too realistic. We can't have stagnant water and naked children running around."

Because it presents poverty as a tourist attraction, the site makes an easy target for critics, including Rush Limbaugh, who mocked the attraction on his syndicated radio show. "I guarantee you after one trip to this slum theme park your kids will never, ever be asking you again, are we there yet, are we there yet?," Limbaugh said on the radio last week.

Lynne Griever, statewide coordinator of the Georgia Task Force for the Homeless, said there was no need to build a mock slum, because people were living in shacks in every county in Georgia. "Habitat does a great job at what they do, and I'm not criticizing their building of the park, but we all miss the point that we have this poverty here at home," she said. In Americus, 28 percent of the population lives in poverty, according to the US Census, compared with 13 percent for the state as a whole.

Koegeman said in the next two months the park will add a dilapidated trailer as an example of poverty housing in America. The trailer belonged to a brother and sister in Americus who last year moved into a house they built with Habitat for Humanity.

Fuller also stressed that the Global Village did not divert funds from the group's house-building work, because all the money came from donations earmarked for the park. He added that the park would ultimately raise money and attract volunteers to the organization's main activities. He likened the costs to money spent on direct mail solicitations. "If this proves to be a huge success, we might replicate it elsewhere," he said.

Construction costs on the park, built on donated land near the organization's headquarters, are about US$1.3 million so far and are expected to reach US$5 million. The opening coincides with the start of a weeklong Habitat for Humanity program to build 92 houses in three poor communities in the region.

The biggest obstacle in building the park, Fuller said, was that builders kept making the slum area too attractive. "We'd say, `you're making it look too nice,'" he said. "`Look at the photo again.'"

Scott Bender, who designed most of the poverty village, said he had never visited its equivalents overseas, but relied on photographs and television images.

The idea for the Global Village stemmed from a group of five model homes the the organization maintained in town to show visitors to its headquarters. Last year, about 12,000 people visited the offices and toured the model houses. "That's just rinky-dink," Fuller said of the five houses. "It made me realize that if we could have more extensive experience, we could give people more of an understanding of the miserable conditions in which so much of humanity lives, and what we've been doing about it."

For the larger park, the organization decided to add a slum area for contrast, Fuller said. "If we just put model housing out there, Americans would look at it and say, `what a modest house,'" he said. "But if you see the slum housing, you say, `wow, what a difference.'"

Outside the cluster of shacks a sign warned, "Because real-life poverty comes with splintered wood, sharp corners, rough-cut tin, the occasional protruding nail and the like, please exercise extreme caution as you walk through this area."

Each model house has a plaque listing the materials and construction costs, a not too subtle hint for donations. The cheapest house, a brick structure used in Malawi, costs US$2,900 to build. None of the houses has indoor plumbing or electricity.

On a tour last week, Alan and Jeanette Carlson, a retired couple from Wilmer, Minnesotta, admired the Papua New Guinea house, a clapboard structure raised on stilts. "It's like a little lake cabin in Minnesota," said Ms. Carlson, 65, who runs a local Habitat for Humanity affiliate. "We should be so lucky."
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