Everyone wants to learn and speak English. Here they yell to us “good morning teacher” as we walk by or “I am fine, thank you.” Emma and I wanted to help the girls at YA learn English in a new fun way. Emma had the idea that we could contact some of our family and friends in the US and the girls could write pen pal letters to these people. Emma worked really hard finding the people willing to write, getting their information and matching them to with the girls in the hostel. She created a “cheat sheet” of English/Portuguese words and phrases that had potential conversation starters and useful words.
Each Sunday night, the only night that all the girls are at home at once, we would gather everyone together. The girls sat around the wooden tables anxiously waiting to receive the letter from their ‘amigo.’ Emma would call each one by name and hand them their card. Grabbing it quickly they would scan it for words that they recognized or knew and then for the rest would rush over to Emma or me. We would work through the letters with each girl picking apart the lines they did not understand and create a new list of verbs and phrases the girls could learn from and study. They would finish and excitedly give their hand-written letter to Emma. Being satisfied for having written another letter in English and excited to see how their friend would respond . Emma would then take a picture of the letter and send it by email to their pen pal in America.
It was an amazing experience although it may have seemed small and insignificant, each person that corresponded with the girls helped to broaden their vision (vision of life outside of Mozambique, vision of a life outside of poverty, vision of a global community, vision of the importance and usefulness of learning English, etc.) During the last batch of letters, the girls wrote in their Facebook names and emails so that they can continue to have correspondence with their new friends in America.
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