Pen Pals

When I was at Junior High School, there was a magazine popular among teenagers. As a young teenage girl from poor family, I couldn’t afford to buy one. To get news update, I had to walk a kilometer to buy a used magazine at the cheapest price. Actually it was not a used magazine. It didn’t sell out. Its cover was removed but the news was more or less update. It was only a week late. As a result the price was cheap.

There was a page in the Kawanku magazine, where readers from around Indonesia even from overseas advertised their mailing address for correspondence.

It interested me. Aside from making friends I was able to collect stamps which developed into a hobby at that time. I sent a couple of letters and within a month I got a couple of replies. I was so excited having new friends from out of town and off course I had to save some money to buy more stamps, nice envelopes, and papers for letter.

Since then, I frequently wrote letters, exchanged photo, stories, and information about my hometown. Every week I received 2-3 letters. It was so exciting when a post man called out my name as he dropped a new letter from one of my pen pals.

One day, I got a letter from overseas. It surprised me when I received a letter from a teenage boy in South Africa. I didn’t know how he got my address. It was my first time to read an English letter and I felt like the most stupid girl in this world because I didn’t know how to reply to his letter in English.

Another letter from another African boy who lived in Ghana arrived few weeks later.  Unfortunately, the letter was never replied because my English was overly poor.

If I could write in English I would have asked if he knew about New Kids on the Block and Tommy Page, the then much discussed American Pop Stars in my correspondence with my pen pal girls.