Mutual Pity In Cross Cultural Relationships

"We first became friends probably out of an almost identical sense of pity for one another. Any American can, I suppose, imagine my pity for Ramon. It was grounded in the contemplation of an intelligent and ambitious youth chained by circumstances to crushing and lifelong poverty in a poor country that offered no future to its ineptly educated citizens. Ramon's pity for me was just as basic as he watched me moving about, confused and frightened in his strange world. I was unable to communicate with anyone about anything but the most animal needs of survival. Except for bananas, and I didn’t know the Spanish word for them, I was unable to identify a single fruit or plant. I couldn’t catch a fish or paddle a canoe or net a shrimp or weave a piece of rope out of a vine or find my way on a jungle trail or even walk on one for more than fifty feet without sinking up to my knees in mud. I couldn‘t machete out a patch of weeds or fix a leaking roof. I couldn’t even cook a pot of rice that didn‘t come out like a great mass of glue. Jesus, I couldn’t even walk a hundred feet without shoes. Ramon found my ignorance so overwhelming that he could hardly bear it; he was confused between tears, depression, and anger. Chances are when I macheted down a tree it would fall on me, hopelessly entangling me in its spiny branches; paddling across the river I was almost inevitably swept out into the rip tides where the ocean breakers crashed onto the sandbar. In the middle of all this, to hear me speak of my four years at university filled Ramon with an incredulous impatience, and about the third time I mentioned my educational qualifications for arriving to overturn his life, he asked me if, in view of my obvious ignorance of everything that he had taken for granted since he was three years old, I would please
lay off the higher education bullshit."

(Moritz Thomsen.The Farm On The River of Emeralds)