Barbara Scott tells us more about some life-changing holidays on the African continent, in these days of globalisation and clash of civilisation, no one can put it better than the author of this piece who has experienced what is like for a British woman to connect with real lives and real people in the West African state of the Gambia.
I have just finished watching a programme on TV called Holiday Hijack. It is a new reality series which aims to show unsuspecting holidaymakers the other side of the country they are visiting. A side which few tourists ever get to see, especially the ones who have the money to go to 5 star luxury hotels. This was the first of the series and the country they were visiting was Gambia. I must say I was a bit apprehensive about it because so many negative stories appear in our papers regarding tourism in your country that I thought this was going to be the same. How wrong I was. The four tourists, three women and one man, thought they had won a free luxury holiday which would have cost them £300 per night for 7 days! They were all seasoned travellers and had plenty of money. They always travelled to luxury resorts and never went outside their hotel, preferring to lay around the pool drinking and partying! Nothing wrong with that I suppose. Certainly not in Western eyes.
You can imagine then their surprise when they were introduced to a local family who lived and worked in Kotu who were going to be their hosts for the week. Not at all what they had planned. They were taken to the home of a lovely woman who lived with her brother and worked Fajara Craft Market. When they saw their accommodation they were, to say the least, rather shocked although the family had made every effort to make them welcome and comfortable, as is they way of the Gambian people. At first they struggled to get to grips with the culture shock. These were people who were used to hot showers, flushing toilets, washing machines, hair dryers, all the things that we in the west take for granted but are a rarity for the average Gambian. However, by the time the programme had finished and they had seen how hard life can be but how kind and caring their hosts were they were sorry to leave. They had all changed their opinion and felt humbled by their experience. They were even offered the chance of spending their last night back at the luxurious hotel that they had left 5 days before but turned it down so they could spend it with their new 'family'.
They vowed to change their way of holidaying in the future and to go out and meet the local people and spend their money outside their hotels instead of in the shops and restaurants within. They had been shown a way of life that they had never imagined before and gained so much from it. From shallow, patronising and quite frankly arrogant tourists they became more caring and thoughtful. That is what the programme aims to do. The people of the Gambia helped them do it. Viva La Gambia!!
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