A friend recently shared this link on Facebook and I was so appalled by the entire idea that I couldn’t even find the words to express my outrage. Apparently the latest trend among the rich and famous is to travel among poor countries—mostly in Africa, of course—to get a glimpse of what it’s like to have dysentery and ribs that show and have to walk miles for water. This photo of people taking a photo of a starving boy is just sickening.

I get that we need to have a window into such poverty, but this seems to be such a glorified act of entitlement and privilege rather than social awareness. Can you imagine what it’s like to already be dying of poverty and then to have some rich, well-fed people come and point and stare and photograph you?

Experts point out that such tourism does bring dollars to the areas that need them so much, but if people really wanted to do that they could just send the money they’d spend on the trip and have it all used by the community instead? And as an interviewed boy from Kenya points out, the money doesn’t help when the full effects of the tourism come to fruition. “It’s not worth it. Slum tourism turns poverty into entertainment, something that can be momentarily experienced and then escaped from. People think they’ve really “seen” something — and then go back to their lives and leave me, my family and my community right where we were before.”

And, of course, if they really wanted to stop poverty in its tracks, they could take the most radical act of all—start paying their damn taxes.