Tourism in a poor country

February 27, 2015 - Today’s class in first-world problems consists of one multiple choice question (BTW, this is a 100% serious question, my tone notwithstanding):

You have a morning off and you bike into town to have a look around. When you are surrounded by children asking to ride your bike and saying “apato!” (“white person”) and, not infrequently, “apato, give me money!”, you should (circle all that apply):

a) Smile, redirect them, and play. They’re just kids, after all

b) Give them money – you have a lot more of it than they do

c) Don’t give them money – no one really likes being a beggar, and it’s best not to encourage it

d) Let them have a spin on the bike – they’re just kids who want to ride a bike, for Chrissakes

e) Don’t let them ride your bike – if one does, everyone will want to, and you’ll be there for hours.

f) Don’t let them ride your bike – it’s way too big for them, and what if one of them got hurt, then you’d probably be fired and also subject to a local justice system that you know nothing about and that might land you in a heap of trouble (you’ve seen the prison right down the road from where you live, after all)

g) Don’t let them ride your bike, and wipe it down with chlorine at the next opportunity – they might have Ebola!

h) Smile and say hi and carry on – you’re here for a legitimate reason, after all, and everyone has a right to take a trip downtown

i) Next time you have a morning off, stay at the camp – all you’re doing in town is exciting envy, an ugly feeling no one likes to feel

j) Next time you have a morning off, go back into town – it’s a global world now, there’s no turning back, and contact and communication are good

k) Next time you have a morning off, do whatever you feel like doing – if you imagine the little commotion you caused in town had any significance in the overall days of the people you encountered, you're dreaming

l) Once you are back home, put some work into finding an organization that is doing good, helpful, generous, committed and integrated development work here and give them a large contribution

m) Once you are back home, never come back here again unless there is another health emergency – the history of the West in Africa is a horrific tale of brutal exploitation, and there is no reason to believe we’re doing that much better now

n) Once you are back home, think long and hard before you come again – tourism dollars generally stay with a small elite, and just lead to increased exploitation and environmental degradation for everyone else

o) Once you are back home, start to plan your next vacation trip here – the beaches are beautiful, and tourism dollars help pump up the economy for everyone

p) Once you are back home, start to plan your next vacation trip here – it’s a global world (see j) and we might as well start getting to know one another

q) Once you get back home, never go anywhere more than 50 miles from your home ever again – given the changes to the climate and the planet, no one should be flying anywhere, ever, unless there is an overwhelming need

r) Remember what you learned the first time you went to India: Just because people’s lives look different than yours doesn’t mean they enjoy them any less than you do. Aside from instances of dire poverty (to the point of malnutrition and homelessness) and/or critical health problems, there are probably just as many happy people, depressed people, angry people, positive people, peaceful people here as there are back home. Get over yourself

s) Other: _________________________________________________________

The best answer is probably a – but anyone who has been reading this blog probably realizes by now that I’m too anxious to do that very well! Given that, my answers are probably: Wholeheartedly: c, e, h, k, l, n, and r. Less certainly: i and m. And I think about f and g, but try not to go down the road of that kind of hypothetical fear, if I can avoid it (that way madness lies).

And then there is q, which seems to me unimpeachably true, but which I have not found, and do not see myself finding anytime soon, the willpower to honor (see Elizabeth Kolbert’s wonderful writing on this subject, most recently in her New York Review of Books essay on Naomi Klein’s global warming book*).

I’d really love to know what others think.

* 'To draw on Klein paraphrasing Al Gore, here’s my inconvenient truth: when you tell people what it would actually take to radically reduce carbon emissions, they turn away. They don’t want to give up air travel or air conditioning or HDTV or trips to the mall or the family car or the myriad other things that go along with consuming 5,000 or 8,000 or 12,000 watts. All the major environmental groups know this, which is why they maintain, contrary to the requirements of a 2,000-watt society, that climate change can be tackled with minimal disruption to “the American way of life.” And Klein, you have to assume, knows it too. The irony of her book is that she ends up exactly where the “warmists” do, telling a fable she hopes will do some good.'

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2014/dec/04/can-climate-change-cure-capitalism/?insrc=toc