Reflection on a Tourist City

GHANA - This past week has been pretty eventful. Unfortunately, not all of it was pleasant as part of the excitement was caused by me being violently ill for a solid 3 days.

I don’t think anyone on this trip has gone unscathed. If they haven’t gotten sick, then they’ve had a digestive issue of some sort. Going into this trip, I knew that it would take our bodies about a month to adjust to the food and climate, but this seems somewhat ridiculous.

Luckily, I recovered in time to go on the group’s weekend trip to Kumasi.

After a 7 hour bus ride, we arrived at the Splendor Hostel. Let me just state that this hostel’s name is deceiving… unless, of course, you find dead cockroaches in the closets, damp mattresses, rooms without running water, and extreme amounts of dust to be splendid.

Whether dealing with getting ridiculously sick, trying to adjust to everything working on Ghanaian time, or spending a weekend in a jankity hostel, I find that the best remedy for frustration is to laugh it off. Humor is the only way I have maintained any shred of sanity in this country. I laugh, accept my misfortunes as part of the experience, and get on with my life.

In any case, I had an overall enjoyable experience in Kumasi. Kumasi is one of the craft centers of Ghana. The streets are filled with vendors selling cloth, wood carvings, paintings, and beads. The streets are also often filled with tourists.

I went into Kumasi knowing that it was somewhat of a tourist hot spot. I expected the ruthless businessmen, I expected the people grabbing my arms and trying to drag me into their shops, I expected constantly being mobbed by people shoving their goods in my face, and I expected having to deal with people trying to sell me items for much more than they were worth.

However, I found it really hard to deal with the exploitation of children. Mothers pushed their children out of doors to beg the Obruni (which means white person or foreigner) for a cedi. Children were seen alone on the streets selling handfuls of bags, backpacks, and keychains. Many children ran up to us and asked for us to give them pens.

The worst case occured when I left a Kente cloth factory that we visited. Upon leaving the shop, a little girl ran up to me and asked for a pen. After I told her that I didn’t have anything to give her, I realized that she was less interested in getting anything from me and more interested in spending time with me. She was very sweet and took my hand for a while. While we loitered in the immediate area, I let her tag along with me. After a bit, a man came up to me and introduced me as her father. And then he tried to give me his child. Despite insisting that I couldn’t possibly take his daughter back with me to America, he kept telling me that I needed to take her. Finally, he asked me, What? Do you not like her?

The way he spoke to me was like he was a businessman and his child was a commodity. I know that he probably thought, for some reason, that I could give her a better life, but the fact that he was so willing to easily give up his own daughter to a complete stranger disgusted me.

As I catch myself judging these people, it really makes me wonder what I would do in their position. In a place where exploiting tourists is a means of survival, would I be a ruthless businesswoman? Would I pickpocket? Would I shove my child out into the streets to beg? Would I grab Americans by the arm to try and drag them into my shop? Would I give away my own child? I’d like to think that I wouldn’t, but who really knows.