This is the second of a four-part series on getting to know the local people and their cultures as I travel around the world.
In 1981-82 I took a sabbatical from teaching to spend most of my time traveling in foreign countries. My brother was a major in charge of the Salvation Army in Panama, and most of his staff members were Panamanians or Colombians. In the month I spent with him, I had an opportunity not only to meet the people he served but many leaders in the community who supported the social service organization’s programs. I did notice that we all had to closely supervise the children in our backyards, as crocodiles would sometimes crawl out of the canals. A month later I was in India with a pack on my back, one of two Americans traveling with a group of Brits in a train car called a boggy. I found the British great fellow travelers with a sense of humor even under the toughest of circumstances. The famous "stiff upper lip" attitude was apparent. They just expected they would get sick with diarrhea and upper respiratory infections but would carry on. In the challenge to keep up with them, I lost more than 20 pounds.
Much of my contact with Indians was traumatic: the beggars, the poverty, the smell of burning cow dung. During those six weeks in India, I also met locals who were interested in discussing their religion and even some who admitted India had a caste system.
After a month back in Columbia, I found myself living with a physician and his family in Morelia, Mexico, as I enrolled in courses for one quarter in the Spanish language and Mexican culture. The family spoke only Spanish, and my teachers were all Mexican. That arrangement did ensure that I had to practice my Spanish regularly.
Some years later, my wife, Carla, and I found international tours arranged for psychologists to meet physicians, psychologists and other professionals in foreign countries. Our first trip took us to Japan, Thailand and Hong Kong.
We found that the mentally ill in those countries were pretty much like the mentally ill in America and that their professionals were struggling with the same problems we had. We did notice that in these patriarchal cultures, the female therapists outshone the males in relationship skills, especially in empathy.
A bit later we took a similar tour of Russia, spending time in Moscow, Rostov-on-Don, Sochi and Leningrad, now called St. Petersburg. Although we weren’t allowed to chat with the locals and those people we could talk to were controlled, we still found opportunities to meet people who were willing to share what their lives were like under communism. Although the trip was enlightening, we felt a great sense of relief when we landed again in the United States.
Later, after the Soviet Union had collapsed, I went back as a member of the International Center for Psychosocial Trauma to find that something in me resonated with the Russian people. They freely told me stories of what it was like to live under the new regime. They felt comfortable with me, they said, because I had an old soul.
The old professor supervises a discussion of Russian mental health workers in Moscow.
Through the years, we have also taken Elderhostel tours of China, Peru, the Galapagos Islands, Australia and New Zealand. In each case, arrangements were made for us to meet locals and have an opportunity to talk with them. Often these were groups of students.
We found that the Elderhostel guides were especially informative and had dealt with enough Americans to know what we would be interested in. Besides their formal presentations, it was usually easy to get them to share their feeling and beliefs about other subjects.
On our safari to Africa, our host and guides were from Kenya and Tanzania, and explaining local culture was one of their goals. This was underlined by having a Masai warrior as a guide who gave us a number of insightful programs on Masai culture.
On one our most recent international trip, we found talking with locals especially easy because we were with Swedish relatives who had invited us to a family reunion. It was to our advantage that all the cousins under 40 spoke good English.
Elderhostel (now Roads Scholar) offers service programs for those travelers who want a more intimate experience. Participants can do such things as work on historical preservation projects or environmental protection through research or teach English. These activities give the visitor an opportunity to make connections with the people of those countries that they wouldn’t make as tourists. Besides Elderhostel, another organization whose Web site impressed me was Global Volunteers, a group that arranges trips abroad with 100 programs in 20 countries on six continents.
The groups’ Web sites are www.elderhostel.org and http://www.globalvolunteers.org/.
I take a lesson in Chinese calligraphy in Beijing during an Elderhostel trip emphasizing education in China. Elderhostel offers travelers the opportunity to make connections with locals when visiting foreign countries.
