Confused Guides Offering Sanatorium Tours For Asylum-Seekers

“You’d have to be, well, crazy not to see the potential of this.”

South Tel Aviv, August 31 – Tour guides around the country expressed bewildered amusement at the macabre tastes of visitors from Africa, but are nevertheless preparing to accommodate the thousands of asylum-seekers by offering tours of mental health facilities.

A spokesman for the National Union of Tourism Specialists (NUTS) said the organization’s membership suggested a shared effort to tap this new market, which has been garnering plenty of coverage in the mainstream press, but in all of that coverage, no mention has been made of the economic potential for professionals who could take asylum-seekers on informative, entertaining trips to Israel’s psychiatric hospitals. The coverage, said spokesman Shigga Ohn, inexplicably focused only on the negative dimensions of an influx of foreigners.

“We tour guides don’t tend to be entrepreneurial geniuses, so it’s a surprising to be in the vanguard here,” confessed Ohn. “But the media have completely ignored how beneficial this influx can be to our tourism-heavy economy. If it’s asylums these people want, then, by God, let’s show them all the asylums we have. There are half-a-dozen hospitals alone with ‘psychiatric’ or ‘mental’ in their names, plus more than a hundred smaller facilities that could answer to the description ‘asylum.’ This is a market just waiting to be tapped, and it took us NUTS people to notice it.”

Ohn said the organization’s roster already includes seven qualified guides with enough historical background to give a meaningful presentation on the major asylums such the Kfar Shaul Hospital in Jerusalem. “Kfar Shaul sits on the ruins of Deir Yassin, so even before getting into the mental health angle of the place, you’ve got a heck of a story, no matter where your political sympathies lie,” he explained. “You’d have to be, well, crazy not to see the potential of this.”

Inquiries to several psychiatric facilities determined that none of them currently offer tours open to the public, and the director of one such asylum objected to the premise. “Our residents and patients are not objects of morbid curiosity,” she said. The closest service that exists is when potential residents or patients are introduced to the facility before admittance.

The NUTS spokesman said that lack of imagination is exactly what is holding the economy back. “There’s no reason to assume that asylum-seekers need to be shown patients at all,” he insisted. “People are stuck in this early-twentieth-century mentality of crazy people as sources of entertainment and freakish curiosity, but that’s not what we’re talking about. We have literally tens of thousands of people from Africa just in South Tel Aviv, all of them being described as interested in asylum, and more of them showing up all the time – there has to be a sensitive but economically viable way to leverage that burgeoning demand.”

“It looks like there’s only one organization trying to do something about that – and that is NUTS,” he added.