He'd raised it with the other staff at the tourist office just the other day: he doesn't agree with charging tourists more than locals for the same goods. A bottle of Coke costs a local 1,500 cedis — about twenty US cents — while a tourist pays 2,000 for the identical bottle. Some of his colleagues see no problem with that; tourists can easily afford the difference, they argue, and it's still cheap by their standards. He sees it differently.
I believe we are all equal, so why should we be charged differently?
Tourists booking through the office get a standard package: a night at the community guesthouse or a home stay, a home-cooked meal, breakfast, and a village tour. Part of what's earned goes to the community — some to the chiefs, some to development projects, including a pottery workshop currently in the works, where local people could produce goods to sell both nearby and to visitors.
New jobs have followed directly from tourism: guiding, cooking, and storytelling, the last performed on request. Shops now stock more items and different ones — mineral water, other drinks, rice, and biscuits in the larger, pricier packages that only tourists tend to buy. Farming remains the backbone of the local economy regardless — mostly cassava, yams, and other vegetables.
Daily infrastructure lags well behind the tourism economy: no telephone lines in the village, no clinic, water drawn from a pump or the streams, and public transport limited to market days when the trotros run through to Luggba. About eight households have their own toilet; everyone else uses the public facilities at the village entrance or the bush. A garbage belt that used to sit in the surrounding bush has given way to household burning, prompted by the understanding that tourists don't care for the sight of it — and the chief backs the shift with fines for households that don't keep clean.
The forest access rule bothers him too, on the same equal-treatment grounds as the pricing issue: locals are barred from entering, tourists and their guides are not. He doesn't think that's right, whatever the reasoning behind it.
Money and infrastructure aside, what stings more personally is a pattern he's noticed with individual tourists — visitors who, asked for help with something like school fees, promise to write or send money once home, and then simply don't.
“I think it would be better,” he says, “if they do not promise things they are not going to live up to. Other than that, I am very happy with tourism and tourists.”