Tourism's greatest achievement, in her eyes, is what it's done for local schools — both the level of education and the sheer variety of courses now available have grown enormously, and that matters most for the region's young people.
But she also sees real danger in what tourism has normalised for that same generation. Young people copy the way tourists dress and behave without registering an obvious truth: those visitors are on holiday for two weeks. The other fifty weeks of the year, back home, they're working hard like everyone else. Imitating vacation mode as a way of life, she says, isn't building anyone's future.
“Tourists are only here for two weeks. Our children forget that, the other fifty weeks of the year, those same people are working hard back home.”
Life for that generation won't be easy regardless. Poverty remains widespread here, driven largely by how much land has already passed into foreign hands — enough that other locals, too, describe feeling like visitors in their own region.
Rising prices, a direct effect of tourism, have made daily life harder still. For women especially, it now often means travelling out to the surrounding villages just to shop somewhere prices haven't been pushed up.
But tourism cuts both ways for her. It has also opened real opportunities for local women to work independently. She's one of several who has started her own shop, and it's become a genuine livelihood.
Her request to visitors is direct: buy your souvenirs from women like her. It doesn't just support her — it supports the families she and the others like her are working to provide for.