Singleton: For former county educator, exploring the world is a way of life

Pieces of the world are scattered all over Sally Mayse's St. Helena Island home.

An original fingers-imprinted rock from the Church of Philippi.

A piece of the earth's mantle from Labrador.

A shepherd's crook made of sheep's horns from Oxford.

A Mongolian hat.

For Mayse, a 71-year-old former Beaufort High School-to-Work administrator who retired in 2011, exploring is a way of life.

"I like to see how things work -- people, communities and especially, cultures. I'm always interested in the cultural aspects of groups -- what they do, how they do it and why they do it," she said recently.

She will travel to Guatemala in a few days with a team that includes two anthropologists. They will build smokeless stoves for the Mayan.

In September, she worked with Global Village 2015 to build a Habitat house in Barskoon, Kyrgyzstan.

Mayse, born Sarah Markle in 1944 in Washington, D.C., was raised with an older sister and younger brother, in Chevy Chase, Md. Her father, John, was a small business owner. Her mother, Mary Louise, stayed at home.

Mayse graduated in 1966 from Queens College with a B.A. in history and secondary education, and from The Citadel in 1991 with an M.A. in administration.

She worked in five Indian villages in Alaska's Interior after college, teaching Bible schools for the summer.

Thirty-nine years later, in 2010, she returned to drive every road in interior Alaska except the road in Nome, before flying up to Barrow to see an Eskimo village and learn more about their culture. She wanted to go to the most northern point of North America. She stood on the Arctic ice shelf, which has since melted away.

That first trip to Alaska was only the beginning.

She took her mother to the Seven Churches of the New Testament, in Turkey in 1996, the year she moved to Beaufort.

Interested in the work of Wilford Grenfell, pioneer medical missionary, she traveled to Newfoundland in 2004. She stayed at the bed and breakfast that was once the medical mission. While there, she fly fished, a passion at that time.

In 2012, Sally stayed with a family in the Transylvania Mountains of Romania.

The following year, she walked across England at Hadrian's Wall.

Having visited Oxford and Canterbury, she plans to travel to every place included in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales.

"England is one of my favorite places. I've been there four times. I love the food; I understand the language; and they're not trying to kill us," she said.

To placate her adventurous spirit, she did the Camino de Santiago Pilgrimage in 2013. Starting out in France, she walked across the Pyrennes into Spain. The 500-mile pilgrimage, drawing 100,000 people annually, took Mayse well over a month to complete. Her Certificate Chemin De Saint Jacques proves she finished.

She visited Delhi, Jaipur and Agra, India, in September. She stopped by the Taj Mahal. She learned to make chai.

She enjoyed a cruise to Greece and to the Island of Santorini, in 1968, thought by some to be the "Lost City of Atlantis." She traveled on to Athens and Crete. She drove all over the Peloponnese and up into the mountains to see the ruins.

She traveled to Ephesus and Istanbul in Turkey in 1966, then south to the Mediterranean.

She visited Denmark and Sweden and also did a tour of the central European countries.

Closer to home, she has traveled most of the U.S., including the 4 corners -- Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and Colorado -- visiting state and national parks. She visited the Santa Clara Pueblo Indian Tribe of New Mexico.

Now she plans a trip to Portugal in 2016, again with Global Village, to help build a house in the northern part of the country.

"The Camino set me free to roam the world by myself in whatever ways I want whenever I want," she said.

This story was originally published December 11, 2015 at 9:41 AM with the headline "Singleton: For former county educator, exploring the world is a way of life."