Why should I pay more?

They try to charge you more based on the colour of your skin. You protest; it’s wrong, of course it’s wrong. 

Growing up in the UK one learns never to judge according to appearances so to be judged, so put in a box on the basis of skin colour hurts. But then look at it from the tomato seller’s point of view; she sees you in your nice clothes, your clean trainers and living in your big house. Then she looks at her clothes, her home and her life. A small patch of land upon which she grows just enough to feed her small children and to sell a little in the market every week is all she has. Her home is a mud hut without furnishings or furniture. Her children go bare foot; they probably don’t go to school because she can’t afford to pay for the uniform or the books. And you wonder why she might try to charge you a little extra for your tomatoes.

It’s true, it’s not your fault she’s poor and it’s true, you don’t have much money either. The difference is in what you mean by ‘no money’. When we in the west say we have no money we mean it’s time to cut back on eating out, it’s time to stop the shopping expeditions or there won’t be a holiday this year. There are places in the world, however, where no money means no money. No money means eating one meal every three days, it means not being able to afford clean water, it means no money to pay for medicine when your child contracts malaria, it means no food when the crops fail, it means feeling you’re failing your children when there is no money to send them to school.

The problem is that the places in the world where there is such extreme poverty are also the places where there are no mechanisms in place to fix the problem. Broadly speaking, in the west, if someone is truly poor then there will be public assistance or someone or some agency to whom they can turn but in a country so poor that it doesn’t have public assistance, then what?

But it is never a straight question of have or have not with countries. The UK has its ‘haves’ and its ‘have nots’ too, it’s just that the ‘haves’ are obliged to help the ‘have nots’ and there are far more ‘haves’ than ‘have nots’. It’s not quite the case in much of the world, however. Taxation doesn’t always work as it is meant, the ‘haves’ might be in the minority but they live so far removed form the bulk of the population they may as well be on the moon. They have no clue that in their home town there also live people who have literally nothing.

Until there is more equality in the world (naivety aside) Europeans will be judged by appearances, because we look rich to people with nothing. So in the market, haggle for a fair price, in the shops accept that you might have to pay a little more than a local and know that the all too common cry of the European, ‘but I’m poor too’ just doesn’t wash when you’re complaining of paying maybe a few percent more in the market. Spend one minute thinking of the life you lead, remember that you’re abroad because you choose to be, because you can afford to be and that you can leave and go home whenever you like, and then remember that although colour is only skin deep, poverty goes all the way to the bone.