WHILE pupils from various schools have been using the final weeks or months of the current school year touring national parks, there has been an appeal by a leading regional administrator that teachers also need to allocate time to visit the country’s tourist destinations and thus help spur domestic tourism.

Yes, they do, and have been doing so for many years, first as an educational opportunity and then as a lifetime experience, moulding the reflexes of young people on the world around them. They make an effort to keep the costs quite low.

How far the pupils or the teachers will for that matter develop a habit of vising attractions as a periodic need for instance at a time of annual leave is an altogether different matter.

It isn’t a routine matter one keeps hearing of or about in offices that this or that employees expects to visit a national park with family during holidays, and alternatively people routinely talk of going to villages to see parents or close relatives.

The fact that there is instant connection these days has definitely cut down this sort of anxiety; there are multiple points of interactions taking people to villages.

While conservation authorities like the Tanzania National Parks (TANAPA) look for strategies to regularly be assured that those visiting any of our attractions come back sometime later, the same is being felt inwardly.

Many of those touring any of those attractions when in primary or secondary school aren’t always imagining when they will be back there. The little curiosity that creeps up the mind is solved by tuning into animal life channels on television, and even on mobile phones.

Conservation authorities figure out that visiting the various attractions is a matter of proper marketing work outside the country as well as education within the country, and thus the latest appeal to teachers.

Had dome background work been conducted it would have been discovered that ‘budget tourists’ save a portion of their earnings during the working year to travel during their annual holidays.

Here we also save money, but essentially it is to buy useful items for the home and build a likeable dwelling place, in the city and in the village.

Looking at the two situations, it is noticeable that many foreign tourists embarks on holiday travel for a “change of air” – and where else but to see the wonders of nature.

It is an aspiration that 21st century marketing looks much like ‘tasting the difference,’ where the difference is another place in stark contrast with the high-rise apartment scenario many people are used to.

With us, there is ‘difference’ when we go to the villages and see our relatives, or show our presence with some property – be it in urban areas or in villages. No ‘third dimension’ exists for natural wonders.

We shall thus need to change society substantially such that one doesn’t have to build an own house, as it were, but just obtain an apartment and pay gradually. We also need to be urban-based to see contrast in nature and marvel at it, while now we are full of nature. We are still villagers.