Being a Tourist in Your Home Country: Christabel Dadzie (Ghana)
Being a Tourist in Your Home Country: Christabel Dadzie (Ghana)
I landed at the Kotoka International Airport in Accra on the 2nd of July for my three and a half week long 'tourist' visit. I thought it would be lots of fun and a breeze finding all the information that I needed for the Ambassadors Program.
BOY! WAS I WRONG!!!
The first two days I spent catching up on lost time with my family and friends and then I set off to work on the third day.
My first encounter with this strange task was when I tried to take pictures on the streets to show everyday Ghanaian life. At the first snap of my camera, A man came by and said, "I don't appreciate you acting like an 'obroni' (white man/tourist) when you really aren't one." I just laughed and asked him what his problem was. Well, he said he was disgusted with Ghanaians who went abroad for a little bit and then decided that they were foreigners.
Wow! I'd never thought of myself as a foreigner before! I was just trying to take pictures for the Ambassadors Program.
That was the end of my photography for that day. I had to gather courage to start this task all over again...
The next week I was trying to gather data on Human Rights issues in Ghana. It was easy to do in the Commission on Human Rights because my mother worked there but I had problems gathering data from other offices because people looked at me and would wonder who was this 'small girl' who wanted everything in her time.
You see, I had forgotten was that I was back in Ghana and time zones had switched from GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) to GMT (Ghana Made Time)!
Information I needed took forever! But with time I just realized that I had to relax and enjoy being home where I could find all the meals that I had been craving for all year long.
Lesson to Ghanaians who might try to be tourists at home: Always speak the local dialect when you want something done for you asap. I learnt the hard way.
Don't get me wrong - being a tourist in my own country was fun!!!
It was just a different kind of experience.