She does her cooking through the tourism centre in town, and she's watched the arrangement improve since it started. When the project began around 1998 or '99, she was paid very little. As prices rose and the workload grew, she asked for more — and got it. What happens to the rest of what tourists pay at the centre, beyond her own fee, she can't say for certain. Her understanding is that it goes toward community development, including a clinic that's still, years on, unfinished.
Group size is what makes the work hard. Twenty-five visitors at once isn't unusual, and when the guesthouse runs out of beds, the overflow sleeps in tents. Cooking dinner for twenty-five people in one sitting is no small task, and she does it herself.
The shops sell more than they used to, though mostly the same products — with one exception: bottled mineral water, something no one sold before tourism arrived. Prices track whatever shopkeepers pay at market plus the cost of hauling goods out to the village, and both have crept upward in recent years.
Medical care means travelling to another town; a health worker visits only rarely, and malaria remains the main concern through the rainy months of June, July and August. Education has improved more visibly — the village's own school now has more teachers than it used to, though children still have to walk over an hour to the next village for secondary school. The current renovation of the school building is thanks to one visitor in particular, who went home, raised money, and comes back periodically to check on progress.
I have seen a good social influence of tourism on our children. Before, kids never wanted to go to school. Nowadays they do, because they want to learn English so they can talk with the tourists.
Daily life here still runs without piped water, telephones, or reliable transport — water comes from a borehole pump or the stream, rainwater is collected in tanks during the wet season, and the minibuses only pass through on market days, every fifth day. There's no rubbish collection either; households burn what accumulates in a pit, though some still dump in the bush.
The forest is the one point that clearly frustrates her. It has always belonged to the ancestors, by local belief, and entering it without the proper ceremony was never something locals did lightly. But now she's told it's off-limits to her entirely — tourists and their guides only — out of concern that locals might damage it. She doesn't think that's fair, especially when it means walking further for firewood.
Tourists, in her experience, behave well, and she enjoys their company and the stories they bring of lives elsewhere — places, she notes with some bemusement, where everyone is busy all the time and neighbours don't stop to greet each other. She still dreams of working in Europe herself for a few years, long enough to pay her daughters' school fees, though she doubts she'll ever actually get there.
Twenty-five plates is a lot for one kitchen. A finished clinic, she suspects, would matter more.