April 20, 2004
The Emporia
Gazette (KS)
Emporia, Kansas
Woman
winding up long journey
By Scott Rochat
News Editor
Emporia, KS--After five years of walking, 26 pairs of shoes and a lifetime of experience, Polly Letofsky is almost home.
"I think of it as sort of a post-graduate education," said Letofsky, who has been walking around the world since 1999 to raise awareness for breast cancer. "There's no way that anyone college-educated for six years has more knowledge about the world than I do-- history, linguistics, economics."
Graduation day is coming soon. Barring disaster, Letofsky will return home to Vail, Colo. on Aug. 1, exactly five years after she started. She reached Emporia on Thursday, leaving for Cottonwood Falls on Sunday morning. She's well ahead of schedule, so she's been able to dawdle a bit. But the end of the road is coming. And she's starting to look forward to it.
"I'll miss that adventure," Letofsky said. "But I'm also excited to stop, get a job and a paycheck, and know I'm going home every night." Letofsky has wanted to walk around the world since she was 12, when she read a story about a similar globetrotter in the 1920s. The push to turn the dream into a reality came 25 years later.
More women she knew were getting breast cancer and Letofsky saw a chance to help a little. So she walked. And talked. Depending on the country, she'll sometimes raise funds as well, but raising attention is a higher priority. "I don't pretend to be changing the world," Letofsky said. "But sometimes it's the first time they've heard about it, or the fifth, or the eighth, or the 10th. That's why we have to keep it in the forefront."
Some travelers might have chosen to head east and stay in the United States as long as possible before going international. But Letofsky decided to go west, to get the difficult Mojave Desert out of the way right at the start. It also meant she could ! spend a lot of the early journey in English-speaking countries, since she would be leaving Los Angeles for New Zealand and Australia (by airplane).
That decision also got her virtually adopted by the Lions Club in Australia. At each town, the local Lions would get her to a pub to spread her message. "They'd introduce me to everyone at the pub and say, "Give her two minutes!'" she remembered. "We'd pass the hat around, raise $300 and send it all to the Breast Cancer Network."
The message has often had to be tailored to fit cultural norms. In the United States, it's no big deal to suggest touching yourself for a breast exam, but Malaysia was another story. There, Letofsky made her greatest headway talking to Malaysian men. "The men have to advocate this (there) and be aware that if you catch it early, there's a 97 percent success rate," she said. "In many of these area, the women are there to serve the family, and they wouldn't go to a doctor for help.
The men were so tired of seeing their wives die prematurely, and they were the ones to get on the bandwagon." One thing Letofsky stresses is that there's no checklist that can say "I'll never get breast cancer."
Eighty percent of women diagnosed with breast cancer, she said, have no known risk factors. It's not always been a smooth journey. She skipped the Middle East entirely, on the advice of the State Department, because of political worries. She's walked through forest fires, lightning storms, 110-degree heat and even a 7.2 Richter scale earthquake in California.
And she set a 25-mile-a-day pace getting through India, where she met with one frustration after another. Part of the problem was avoiding any food that had been washed in the river water: "I survived on oranges, bananas and hard-boiled eggs."
But the rest of it was cultural. "You don't understand the whys or hows of anything," Letofsky said. "You can't depend on anything. For example, it says in the guidebook, if you ask someone a question and they don't know the answer, they'll lie to you. It's an incredible gamble as you decide whether to believe someone at all, which means you can't believe anyone."
Europe was also something of a letdown. Letofsky had been looking forward to the continent for much of the trip, finally arriving in Greece in July 2002. That's when she found that many of the countries were experiencing an influx of Eastern European Gypsies. Pulling her baggage trolley behind her, Letofsky was mistaken for one of them, and virtually shunned. The campgrounds wouldn't let her pay for a spot. She was too old for the youth hostels, and the bed-and-breakfasts wouldn't take a one-night stay. "It was impossible to find a place to stay," Letofsky said. "A lot of times, I had to find a cornfield and pitch a tent."
That's been atypical, though. Most places, people have come out of the woodwork to help. She's even ended up sending 34 boxes of stuff home, from folks she's met along the way. And some places she has absolutely loved, particularly England and Turkey.
She's never thought about turning back or giving up. And it's never been dull. A tongue-in-cheek list kept by Letofsky notes that she has been interviewed 780 times, taken 15,000 photos, been stopped by police 46 times and received 12 marriage proposals (none accepted).
That doesn't count the more unique moments, such as being in Malaysia on Sept. 11, 2001. Since it happened late at night by the local time zone, Letofsky heard most of the details on the TV. Every village, she noted, seemed to have a television tuned to CNN, with a crowd of people watching.
"Ironically, the only night in my nine months of crossing Muslim countries that I stayed with a Muslim family was that night," she said. "We sat down that night in front of CNN and watched it together." She felt isolated from what was going on back home, cut off.
But an unexpected respite came at a hotel in Thailand. "I don't know why I turned the TV on, but it was 2 a.m! And, I swear, Jay Leno popped on," Letofsky said. "They played back- to-back Jay Leno-Conan-Jay Leno-Conan until 6 in the morning. I stayed up all night. It was like going home for a few days."
Soon enough, it'll be home for real, with a lot of memories and a lot of assurance. After five years of globetrotting, little fazes her. "It's one of those confidence-building things," she said. "You know no matter how big the hurdle is, you need to sit down, have a cappuccino, make a plan from A to B and start preparing."
rochat@emporiagazette.com
Copyright (c), 2004, The Emporia Gazette Record Number: 102160EBB9108D04