Tourist symptom

First off, election day in Brazil! Though I couldn't register as a resident voter in Ghana, my thoughts are with the nation!

So, Friday at Development Alternatives Incorporated (DAI), Toni was going out to order the new office furniture. Toni is the regional project manager, and is in Ghana for three weeks, flying in from Washington to assist in the start-up activities. She is a tremendous asset to the office dynamics, and the staff was actually planning to ask the home office to keep her here for another week.

Toni asked if I wanted to join her, for a second opinion on the furniture and paint colors. Since I'm so experienced with interior designing (not), I went along.

The bottom line is we did get the paint buckets in DAI colors (brown, blue and green), and selected the furniture for all the office, from the reception and the conference room, to the cubicles and managers' tables.

What I wanted to blog about though, is a comment Toni made in one of our conversations stuck in traffic. Toni traces her roots back to the Democratic Republic of Congo, and so considers herself African.
With this perspective, she gave me her take on tourists in Africa: "Tourists come to Africa to take picture of kids".

My thought ran through the past two months.

Guilty.

Though I felt I was blending in as a local (in terms of behaviors), I also took part in some of the cliche, touristy actions. Taking pictures of groups of children, which is supposed to represent Africa.

This thought is SO far off the reality, it actually made me chuckle.So the children are very cute and sympathetic. But it now seems to me as the expected behavior of an obruni in Ghana.

I don't mean to say I am against taking pictures of children; they actually enjoy it more than we do! But recognizing the difference between appearing to be culturally immersed, and actually being part of the environment is essential. Thanks to Toni, this aspect of living in Ghana (not Africa, that is way too broad), was reanalyzed.

Still, pictures of children are on this post, but recognized as a symptom of "touristiness", not because they present a view of what is life in Ghana. That, I still am discovering.


Happy Halloween!

Henrique