Sound judgment is based on experience.

Last week, our newspaper’s pages carried several tales of travel.

Kevin Hickey, a local professor who is hosting an African film series, told of his six-year trek across Europe and Africa — he rode his bike over 41,000 miles across 52 countries. He saw those countries and their people up close.

This is partly because he traveled by bicycle, which he said left him open to the world around him. Also, his funds were limited so he relied on the kindness of strangers to survive.

Hickey’s adventures, which took place nearly three decades ago when he was 23, have sustained him for a lifetime. The hardships he endured — for example, in being the first American to bike across the Sahara — left an indelible impression. He relied on strangers — the traffic traversing the desert — to supply him with the water that kept him alive.

Hickey distinguishes between travel and tourism. Tourists, he says, go out to enjoy themselves and relax while travelers go out to discover new places.

Today it may seem there are few places left to discover, few places that haven’t been charted and explored, visited and written about.

But it is the intimacy with which we can know those places that can make them still an adventure, still worth reporting about.

Last week, too, we wrote about a freshman at Guilderland High School who had toured China with the People to People Student Ambassador Program.

Paul Jones held spellbound a group of third-graders at Pine Bush Elementary, a school he once attended, as he showed them the photographs he had taken in China and displayed the treasures he had acquired.

The journey was not arduous and the sights he saw — such as the Forbidden City, the Great Wall, or the Terra Cotta Warriors — could probably all be described as tourist attractions. And yet, because he had seen them with his own eyes and appreciated the culture they exemplified, he could serve as an ambassador, spreading the word of what he had learned to others.
Zhou Ji, a teacher from China, had a longer commitment, traveling to this country spending half a school year at Pine Bush Elementary and the other half at Guilderland High School. He describes himself as a "peace lover" and is sharing himself and his culture with students here.

Both were sponsored by programs that were borne of world wars. I do not believe this is coincidence.
Zhou Ji is part of the American Field Service International program. The AFS slogan is: "Walk together, talk together, all ye people of the earth, then and only then shall we have peace."

The program was founded in 1914 by a volunteer ambulance corps during the first world war. The ambulance corps dealt with the bloody remains of battle — the helpless, the wounded, the dying, all without glory.

The People to People Student Ambassador Program that Jones was a part of was started after the second world war, with the goal of achieving understanding among citizens of all nations.

This is a tall order. But it is something to which Jones and Ji sound committed.
"May our two countries always experience peace and friendship," Ji said during a farewell student assembly at Pine Bush Elementary School last week.
If we truly understood and valued people in other countries, people with other cultures, would we make war on them" If we understood the Kurds and the Sunnis and the Shiites, would we have invaded Iraq"

My own youthful travels taught me that, even when we journey, we bring ourselves with us. As a student of literature, an American woman, I spent months trekking through the Hebrides with only a soggy backpack and a journal for companions, retracing a journey made two centuries earlier by a Scotsman and an Englishman.

Samuel Johnson, the great 18th-Century man of letters, condemned those who judged by principle and precept rather than by perception.

Late in his life, he undertook this journey to the Scottish Hebrides at the urging of his faithful companion and biographer, the Scotsman, James Boswell. Each man wrote an account of his journey.

As a lexicographer, Johnson was always concerned with accuracy. He’d measure and pace to report what he saw on his journey with precision, but his views were not abstract.
"To abstract the mind from all local emotion would be impossible if it were endeavored," writes Johnson, "and would be foolish if it were possible. Whatever withdraws us from the power of our senses, whatever makes the past, the distant, or the future predominate over the present, advances us in the dignity of thinking beings," he writes in his account, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland.
Although Johnson and Boswell physically saw the same things on their journey, they perceived them differently. The people of Iona, for example, are described by Johnson as "gross," and by Boswell as "industrious."
After recounting the island’s ancient history as a gateway to Christianity, Johnson writes, "But the fruitfulness of Iona is now its whole prosperity. The inhabitants are remarkably gross, and remarkably neglected: I know not if they are visited by any Minister.
"The Island, which was once the metropolis of learning and piety, has now no school for education, nor temple for worship, only two inhabitants that can speak English, and not one that can write or read."

To Johnson, it does not matter that the island is fruitful; materialism is not important. The larger concerns of piety and learning are neglected, so the inhabitants are judged as deficient. Johnson is concerned with faith, whereas Boswell, at times more modern, is concerned with productivity.
Boswell describes the same Ionians this way: "The people seemed to be more decently dressed than one usually finds those of their station in the isles...They sell about forty cattle and more than 150 bolls of barley, and what is remarkable, they brew a good deal of beer, which I could not find done in any of the other isles.
"I was told they imported nothing but salt and iron. Salt they might soon make. It is a very fertile island, and the people are industrious. They make their own woollen and linen webs, and indeed I suppose everything else...."
Johnson dismissed the island’s fruitfulness in one sentence whereas Boswell spent many detailing it. Boswell does not discuss any moral neglect. In his terms, because the people are "decently dressed," "industrious," and productive, they are seen not as gross, but as good. The descriptions differ with the judgment.

And so it is with all of us. Our prejudices shape our perceptions. Because we value, say, democracy, as Johnson did piety or Boswell did industriousness, we may assume our form of government can be imposed on another culture without understanding truly how that culture works.

Most of us cannot spare the time and funds for world travel, but each of us can reach a wider understanding by looking at films or reading novels or plays or ballads or laws or holy scriptures that come from different cultures.

We can open ourselves to listening and learning from those who have traveled or who come from other lands.

The principal of Pine Bush Elementary last week told us something wonderful about the third-graders at her school who are learning about three different cultures on three different continents — South America, Africa, and Asia.
"They’re very open-minded about learning the way other countries do things," she said. "They haven’t formed opinions that one way is better than another."

As we age, we choose what path to follow. Let us experience as much as we can of our world so that we will choose wisely.

— Melissa Hale-Spencer, editor