The Surf Resource Network Essay

Jose Perez
2/14/2012
Teaching vs. Giving

Imagine a place where it is always sunny during the day. A place where the beach is covered in white sand and the water is crystalline blue. A place where the waves are so amazing that people from all over the world come to surf. A person that loves surf could describe this place as paradise. Surfers are not the only ones who come to this place. Also people bring their families for vacation but surfers mostly populate the beach. This wonderful place actually exists and is not a desert island in the middle of nowhere. This place is a town in Liberia called Roberts Port. The natives of this town all form a community and they consider this place as their home. Poverty is a major problem in this community. The people from this community are so poor that they don’t even have toilets. The natives just do their necessities anywhere they can. Sometimes they even contaminate their own water resources by mistake and some people end up dying. How is it possible that in a place considered as a paradise by the tourists, the people who actually live there are dying because they don’t have enough money for a simple septic system?

Having a lot of tourism is vital for a town like Roberts Port. If more people come to this town this means that there are more business opportunities for the natives. “The promotion of tourism has been identified as a key strategy that can lead to economic upliftment, community development and poverty relief in the developing world” (Binns, Tony, and Etienne Nel 235). There is some tourism in Roberts Port but for some reason the natives are still suffering from poverty. The reason they are still having problems with poverty is because the natives don’t know how to benefit from the tourism in their community. Some people have their own small business where they just provide a service to the tourist and charge some amount of money in exchange. Some examples are: offering the tourists a day tour around the...