Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, July 22, 1990 TAG: 9007220254
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JAYNE CLARK
DATELINE: LOS ANGELES LENGTH: Long
But, then, participants in what was billed as a "reality tour of Third World America" were not a wide-eyed crew of limousine liberals cruising Appalachia to gawk at poverty as if it were a quaint tourist attraction.
The tour, dubbed "Appalachia: Third World in the U.S.," received a flurry of media attention months before its June departure, when a widely circulated Associated Press story reported that, for $500, tourists could spend nine days looking at "impoverished families, crumbling coal-mining towns and streams strewn with discarded appliances and other junk."
Though this is not what tour planners had in mind, state tourism officials were outraged. West Virginia's commissioner of commerce suggested people at Global Exchange, the San Francisco-based group organizing the tour, should wander through the barrios of Los Angeles if they wanted a dose of Third World reality.
Global Exchange's motives went beyond sightseeing. The tour focused on grass-roots community organizations in central Appalachia that are working to improve conditions in an impoverished area that does, indeed, have many Third World characteristics.
With that in mind, seven tour members, along with a local activist who led the group, a Global Exchange representative and a volunteer driver, set out from Knoxville and traveled through parts of northern Tennessee and southern Kentucky. We visited tiny coal towns and remote hollows with names like Jellico, Clairfield and Roses Creek. We bypassed craft shops, state parks and did not so much as dip a toe in a nearby lake that attracts thousands of vacationers.
Instead, stops on our itinerary included a coal tipple (a facility where coal is washed), a women's center and a rural health clinic. These are not standard highlights on any tour-bus route. But the Third World reality tour was not a typical tour.
We spent time at a site where a church group was building a $6,000 house for a young family of four that had been sharing cramped quarters in a trailer with five other family members. We shared a picnic with a Kentucky group fighting a proposed regional landfill. We listened to a quick-witted young woman tell of her struggle to get a college degree and heard how she is helping other women do the same.
Accommodations were basic. We stayed in rustic cabins and budget motels. Meals consisted primarily of picnic lunches and potluck dinners.
Clearly, this kind of travel is not everyone's idea of fun. That only seven paying customers - three of us newspaper reporters there for just the first days of the trip - signed up despite the deluge of publicity is evidence of that.
The tours are not relaxing, but they are not meant to be. They are not luxurious, but that is to be expected given the rock-bottom prices. (Cost of the Appalachia tour was $500 for nine days, excluding air fare.)
The tours are supposed to be enlightening, allowing participants a close-up look at certain aspects of a community and the people who live there.
The desire to bring home something more meaningful than a suntan is what attracted the four non-media members of our group to the Appalachian tour.
"I'm always looking for alternative sorts of travel," said Betty Ellis, a 64-year-old homemaker from St. Paul, Minn. "I don't like being a tourist. I'm through looking at `sights.' And I came because the issues being discussed were interesting to me - although I'm not an activist."
Other members of the group included Jean Schnall, 44, a convention planner from San Francisco who has fond memories of the time she spent as a Volunteers in Service to America volunteer in Appalachia during the '60s; Sharon Hallas, 44, a personnel analyst and union organizer also from San Francisco; and Becky Lorentz, a 40-year-old schoolteacher from Klickitat, Wash.
"If I wanted to see poverty, I could have stayed at home," Lorentz said. Instead, she was drawn by the natural beauty of the area.
The hills and hollows of central Appalachia are thick with hardwoods and evergreens. Mountain roads twist throughout, like snakes slithering through tall grass. The rolling landscape swallows up everything that enters it, making the place feel even more isolated than it is.
Strip-mining operations have carved jagged brown scars across the lush green hills. Guardrails are pitted with rusted dents, where coal trucks weighted down with the black fuel have crashed when their loads shifted.
Appalachia is an area roughly the size of Italy that encompasses parts of 12 states and all of West Virginia. It is a land where the wealth of natural resources makes the poverty of the people all the more striking.
Local community organizers, like Marie Cirillo, the former Catholic nun who led our group, blame many of the region's problems on absentee landowners. They extract the riches (mainly coal and timber) and take the profits elsewhere, organizers say.
Local people we met complained that it is impossible to control their destiny if they do not own the land.
If the term Third World describes a place in which a minority controls a majority of poorly informed people, then parts of Appalachia are, indeed, Third World. But, while local activists use the description easily, it makes some civic leaders squirm.
"Anybody can take a negative attitude," said Alvin Sharpe, director of the Williamsburg (Ky.) Tourist Commission.
The town's recently formed tourism office is headquartered in an eye-catching red caboose at the edge of town. Civic leaders hope to lure tourists bound for the nearby Big South Fork National Recreation Area and Cumberland Gap State Park. An image of desperate poverty is not one that typically attracts outsiders in search of summer fun.
Business leaders are not the only ones disturbed by the Third World label. It also offends poor Appalachians, who may equate poverty with a failure to grab a piece of the American dream.
They also are stung by stereotypes that paint them as moonshine-guzzling, banjo-picking hillbillies trapped in hopelessly backward conditions.
"We may be referred to as hillbillies, but we're good people, and if that's what hillbilly means, we're proud of it," said David G. Young, a judge in rural Campbell County, Tenn.
In fact, even though their opinions were sometimes at odds with each other, the local people did more to crush ugly stereotypes than did the efforts of tour leaders who seemed eager to press their views on a tour group that consisted primarily of the people who already shared their views.
The Appalachians talked of close-knit families, of the goodness of the people and the beauty of the mountains. But they also spoke candidly of the overwhelming problems in the region.
At Cumberland College in Williamsburg, Ky., Rick Rieffer, director of the Mountain Outreach Program, a group that is organizing volunteers to build five $6,000 houses in five weeks this summer, was plainspoken about the squalor he sees.
"We deal with people who live in school buses, chicken coops, tar-paper shacks or no place at all. In the cities, it's 1990. In the hollers, it's 1890," he said.
In nearby Jellico, Tenn., a fading coal-mining town in a county where the number of mine workers has plummeted from 4,000 to fewer than 400 in the last decade, many downtown buildings sit empty. The only restaurant in sight, the City Cafe, is a dismal place decorated with signs warning customers "No Profanity No Loitering No Pot Smoking and Absolutely No Gambling."
Cindy Greene, 31, runs the educational cooperative at the Mountain Women's Exchange in Jellico. In a society where men and women adhere to strict gender roles, she is an anomaly, working full time while her husband runs the household. She earned a college degree by attending night classes at the women's center. Ten others also have gotten degrees via the program she oversees.
"Most of these people don't see themselves as activists," Greene said. "They see themselves fighting like hell to survive."
To outsiders, life in Appalachia may seem bleak. But lifelong residents have a different view.
"Appalachia is unique," Shelby York said. "We've always been hemmed in and isolated. But we got our own system and our own ideas, and we'll work things out."
by CNB