TEACHER RESOURCE
Perspectives on the World by Ingrid Hutto
Late one afternoon in a small park in Lima, Peru, I met Leo, a student taking time off to earn
money as a street vendor. He asked about my trip and said he'd like to travel. He told me what I'd heard
from many others in that sad country: the people can't afford to live. Some customers came up to look at
his wares, and I stepped aside so that he could help them.
The man selling next to Leo started firing questions at me: "Why don't you buy anything from
me? Where are you staying? How much does it cost? You're from the United States. You have money."
He had harsh features and glazed eyes, and he looked as if he had been chewing coca leaves (which have
the power to numb hunger pangs). I was frightened and didn't want to talk to him, so I tried to move away.
He followed me to shake my hand and say buen viaje, "have a good trip." He squeezed my hand
so hard I thought my bones would be crushed. He leaned forward as if he were going to kiss my cheek, a
Latin American custom. Then he spit in my face.
I didn't know what had happened. I just stood there confused. He came back. He grabbed my
arms and spit in my face again. This time he spit harder. As he walked away, he said he would find me in
Argentina. I stood there... lost.... and then felt the tears on my face. I looked around at all the faces on the
street in Lima. It wasn't the same anymore. I was in Peru with spit on my face.
.... How many others felt the anger and frustration he did? What kind of life was he living that
would make him want to spit on me? It was a life, a world, I hadn't known. As my travels continued, I
found that everyone's priorities and values weren't mine. When I left India, I walked down a muddy dirt
road to a wooden shack that served as an immigration office for travelers heading into Nepal. Inside, a
dangling bare light bulb illuminated the faces of all the men staring at me. Their expressions told me they
thought I was a prostitute because I was a woman traveling alone. I realized it was acceptable, even
expected, that I would pay an extra fee, i.e. bribe, for a visa to cross over to Nepal.
When I landed in Lesotho, southern Africa, I jumped into an old blue bus because it was the only
one outside the small airport terminal. The bus roamed around for a while picking people up out of fields.
Everyone but me was a Basotho from Lesotho speaking Sesotho, and I understood why all their curious
eyes were on me. Everyone talked to everyone. No inhibitions. They spoke loudly as the bus roared. I
was the only woman on the bus. I felt so white and so female. I understood absolutely nothing anyone
said, and I didn't know where I was. But the Basotho were so comfortable with their excitement and
laughter that I laughed, too.
I walked through villages on the white sandy beaches of Western Samoa in the South Pacific and
spoke with people sitting under the thatched roofs of their wall-less huts. .... I had left (South Carolina) to
plunge into my nine-month journey with a Western outlook, my vision of the way I thought the world
should work. I soon found myself looking in another way. It was not so much looking at or looking for,
but seeing with its own vision of the human experience.
I learned to appreciate meaningful perspectives and approaches to problems that were new to me.
Each country to which I traveled had an outlook in harmony with its history and traditions, its unique
personality. I was drawn to each in a different way and learned to share in it and communicate, often
without a common language....
I experienced a world of unlimited visions. I found a planet full of cultures deserving of respect
and appreciation, each with its own wonders and difficulties, problems and triumphs, misery and laughter...
each one as meaningful as another.
Ingrid Hutto, a Columbia, South Carolina native, traveled on a yearlong global tour as the 1998
Wofford Presidential International Scholar.
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