Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 8, 1990 TAG: 9004060465
SECTION: CURRENT PAGE: NRV2 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: Ned Bane
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The bus pulls in. Out pours a mash of men in sherbet-colored suits and slick white shoes, along with their wives in day-glo pantsuits. They are poised like bird watchers hoping for a glimpse of the great pileated woodpecker.
But this gang of gawkers from Newark is not standing in a primitive forest in Africa or South America. Nope. They're in good old Pearisburg, or Norton, or Abingdon, right here in Southwest Virginia.
These are paying passengers on a tour of Appalachia dubbed the "Third World in America," hawked by a San Francisco travel agency.
These eager tourists hope to catch a glimpse of barefoot, pregnant, buck-toothed, hookworm-infested hillbillies. For here in the Great Southwest of Virginia, if one is to believe the travel agents Out West, dwell those genetic misfits.
Basically, we are a harmless species that have spent decades inbreeding, leaning on soft-drink machines, wearing billed "Red Man" caps and selling live bait, according to the sophisticates of the tourist agency, Global Exchange.
In the past, this outfit has offered excursions to Haiti, the Dominican Republic and Brazil.
The tour director, Laurie Adams, contends that most of her clients are students and community volunteers "interested in meeting grass-roots activists trying to solve social and environmental problems."
Yeah, right.
So how come the tour's itinerary is heavy with visits to corporate symposia and research centers?
Yes sir, the Highlander Education and Research Center in New Market, Tenn., is absolutely teeming with them-thar grass-roots folks. If someone didn't tell you, you'd think you were at Big Ed's Exxon, which even has a Coke or Pepsi machine to lean on.
"One of the reasons we focused on Appalachia is there are people working hard to solve their problem," Adams said, according to the Associated Press.
Well, that's just swell. Let's just turn it into a real sideshow. I can see the signs now: "Please Don't Feed the Natives."
So brace yourself, native Virginians. The Global Exchange buses are headed for Virginia, West Virginia and Tennessee in June. State tourism officials are hardly thrilled.
"I suggest that those folks could save a lot of money and get a great dose of Third World reality by simply walking through the barrio in Los Angeles," snapped West Virginia Commerce Commissioner John Brown.
In fact, they could make a package tour starting right in San Francisco at Haight Asbury, then proceed to the Midwest with a stop in East St. Louis, a swing south to the Desire Street housing project in New Orleans, a northward turn to Harlem, and wind up in Roxbury in Boston.
Like those urban slums, we've got our problems. Poverty and unemployment, to name just two. But they're not for tourists' amusement.
If these folks want to cough up $500 apiece for a tour ticket, let them first consider how many kids that could feed in Harlan, Ky. - or in San Francisco, for that matter.
by CNB