CAPE MAN REFLECTS ON `THAT OTHER AMERICA'

Ivan H. Nothdurft didn't care much for the monkey meat or the lightheaded sleeplessness at 9,000 feet above sea level, but his days in South America, and especially Argentina, "were the most satisfying years of my life," he says.

Now 79, Nothdurft recounts his experiences in South America in his recently published book "Reflections on That Other America."

The book, available through Metro News Book Store or from Nothdurft himself, is a compilation of reminiscences and observations from the years 1945 to 1967, when Nothdurft, his wife, Lorla, and their three daughters called "that other America" home.

The monkey meat he ate because as a guest "you eat what people serve you." And the altitude sickness he experienced in Cochabamba, Bolivia, in the Andean Highlands was cured by moving to Lima on the coast of Peru.

The satisfactions come through in his reminiscences of teaching a bunch of South American children the Virginia reel, and the feeling of being accepted and made to feel at home in a foreign land.

South America -- especially Argentina -- is the place he thinks of as home.

"I felt more at home there than I do in Cape Girardeau," he says.

Nothdurft grew up in Cape Girardeau, graduated from Southeast and Garrett Theological Seminary, and began his career as a missionary to Bolivia.

"I was green as grass, a director of a school and the only one from another country," he said. "It was tough.

"But after a year they said I was one of them."

Siles Suazo, one of the students at Nothdurft's school, went on to become the president of Bolivia.

Lima, where he was a pastor and became the director of a school run by the Methodists, was the next South American stop.

His wife also taught, and at one point developed a course in shorthand for the students.

Along the way, Nothdurft earned a doctorate in international relations from Columbia University, graduating in the same class that produced Dr. Ruth Westheimer.

Their stay in South America was capped with 10 years in Buenos Aires.

His children, all of whom were born in South America, grew up speaking both Spanish and English.

Nothdurft and family returned to the United States from South America in 1978, in part so the girls could go to college here. He became the American Bible Society's secretary for Latin America, U.S.A., retiring in 1982. That's the year he and his wife moved from Long Island back to Cape Girardeau.

Living a large part of his life in a different culture has taught Nothdurft that "it's too simplistic and smug to consider that our ways and viewpoints are best and uniquely perfect," he writes.

He has lived among cultures much older than our own. One of the two oldest universities in the Western Hemisphere is located in "the other America," Nothdurft points out.

Peru's University of San Marcos was founded in 1551. The other oldest school, the University of Mexico in Mexico City, was founded that same year.

Harvard wasn't established until 100 years later.

Nothdurft is well aware that the life he lived so far away is "different from what most people do."

The payoff, he says, "is when people accept you and make you feel at home. Then it's easy."