I love writing letters, eversince I was a child. My mother encouraged that habit since I was five, and my grandfather nurtured it by always writing back in his beautiful cursive handwriting. This correspondence continued for a few months. By then, it became my favourite way of communicating with friends and cousins in faraway places. While letter-writing seems like a dying art, I have kept it alive to some extent and definitely want it to be part of my legacy to my daughters. So, when we set about our five-week travel schooling pilot in February this year, I made plans to introduce my daughters born in the age of email, whatsapp and snapchat to the sublime beauty of sending postcards.
Determined to make this an educational experience, as soon as we landed in Tahiti, we purchased postcards showing beautiful Polynesian scenery. Those made their way into my backpack, but have never made their way out despite unpacking and then packing those same bags for yet another trip. One reality of travel schooling your kids is that things get lost. Things will get lost. Forever. Without a trace. So parents, if you haven’t lost your kids or your wallet or travel documents while traveling and educating your kids, you’ve come out summa cum laude!
Saving grace, our resort had lovelier stationery and postcards provided in our room. On one morning, I had my elder daughter Sanaa write up a line or two on a postcard to her best friend from kindergarten. And on the last day, as we were about to board our flight from Tahiti onward to Australia, we decided to post her first ever postcard. We bought stamps from the concierge at the Intercontinental Resort just before checking out. She was full of questions — Why do we need stamps? Why do we pay for them? Who gets the money? I explained to her using a map how the postcard is going to travel across the Pacific Ocean using the postal services and reach her friend on the Atlantic coast of North America. That Uncle Postman should be getting the money we pay for those perforated stickers seemed to satisfy her young but fair mind.
The post box in itself was an education for her. The idea that her postcard would vanish in this blackbox (yellow, actually) and magically find itself in Toronto seemed to fascinate her. In my explanation of the process, I had left the postbox out! We started at the yellow box for a minute because it had two slots labeled in French, one for local mail and the other etranger. Etranger, in French means “foreign” but the translation on the box read “France”. This made an impression on me, a reminder of how remotely located French Polynesia is. Why would there be a reason to believe that the rest of the world exists? Except France, of course, which they are part of! We were still quite unsure because her postcard was supposed to stop a whole ocean before Europe. She hesitatingly dropped her postcard into the slot labeled “France” as advised.
Enthralled by this experience, both Sanaa and Samaa were interested in sending postcards to their grandparents from Auckland, the final stop on our five-week trip. They thoroughly enjoyed purchasing stamps, taking turns to affix them and finally dropping the postcards one by one into the much more clearly marked postboxes.
Their delight reached its peak when messages of postcards reaching started coming in. In fact my elder daughter considered this such an important experience that upon meeting her best friend in her kindergarten class, she demanded that she should furnish her with the postcard which she claimed to have received. Sanaa has still kept it as a souvenir, and refuses to give it to the originally intended recipient!
This was Snail Mail 101 for my four and two year old daughters. As a way to reinforce their understanding of the Postal system and in the hope of keeping their interest in writing letters kindled, now that we are in home until our next travel schooling trip, we hope to visit Toronto’s First Post Office.
Have you introduced your kids to letter writing yet? Please share your experiences and thoughts in comments below.
