Georgia attraction will feature shanty town but no roller-coasters
The United States’ latest theme park, which will open in the state of Georgia later this week, will have no roller coasters, merry-go-rounds or the like, but mud huts, open sewers, and other features found in slums around the world.
The Global Village and Discovery Centre, created by the Habitat for Humanity organisation, is essentially a 6.5-acre shanty town built with the intention of teaching the world’s well-off “how the other half lives”.
According to a report in The Independent, visitors to the centre, which opens on 7 June in the town of Americus, will “get their thrills by making tiles in mock squalor, and discovering – albeit briefly – what it would be like to live in a scorpion-infested shack”. Millard Fuller, founder of Habitat for Humanity, told the newspaper: “Essentially it is a theme park for poverty housing. You will come right out of the centre and walk into a slum. You will see the kind of pitiful living conditions so many people in the world have.” For more details on the park visit http://www.habitat.org/.
