I’ve been sharing my recent work with a crazy remote and challenged school in the mountains of Paracelis, Philipinnes. The school serves the isolated Ga’dan tribe. The teachers make a 2 hour commute over rough road, then stay the week in the two room school– the other four rooms were recently destroyed by a Typhoon.
Despite their sparse and challenging situation, the students are so keen to learn and connect.
When I did my little customary spiel on Canada, they we’re full of questions. Do you grow rice? How do you get married? What foods do you eat? What do they youth do for fun? Etc. These students come from such a vastly different culture. It struck me that they would make fantastic pen pals for students of the same age back in Canada. I asked them what they thought of the idea. They loved it!
So, we wrote some letters! 122 to be precise. Each letter begins “Dear Mystery Friend”. The student introduces themselves and where they are from. I personally love to write letters, so I shared some techniques with them– including some flowers or leaves, making a little drawing or two, custom made envelopes.
The result: We’ve got 122 amazing letters just waiting for mystery friends! Anyone out there have a class or bunch of youth who would be interested in old-fashioned-pen-pals? The kids were aged 9-16. If so, drop me a line!
