Pen pals from Lebanon

I open the door to the local Lebanese post office. My mission is to send a parcel of letters from my students to their pen pals in Canada. I put the parcel on the desk.

The postal worker looks it over and calls his co-worker. "Hmmm, it's going to Canada. You'll have to fill out a form." Filling out forms in Lebanon involves at least one coffee break and numerous searches for the correct form.

Just as I finish one form, the man hands me another. "Sorry, that one is only for parcels to Syria." I fill out the second form. Everything is ready, but I know it cannot be that easy.

"Sorry, we don't have enough stamps. Can you come back tomorrow?" I find myself saying, "Sure, no problem." At least the coffee was good.

That is the reality of sustaining a letter exchange between Lebanon and Canada. My students in the village of Khirbet Qanafar communicated with students from Rockway Mennonite Collegiate in Ontario and Westgate Mennonite Collegiate in Manitoba.

My students eagerly waited for their pen pals to write back. When the letters arrived, they spent the whole class reading and re-reading the contents, and passing around pictures. They found that people in Canada see the world quite differently than they do.

One girl here wrote that one of her favourite hobbies was travelling. That means she enjoys the one-and-a-half hour trip to Beirut, the hour-long trip to the beach, or the half-hour trip to the swimming pool. She was startled to discover that travel to a Canadian might mean day-long car trips or trips to other countries.

The similarities have been most interesting. Many share hobbies such as swimming or playing basketball. Others have found that high school, in its oscillation between friendship and enmity, is the same in Canada and Lebanon.

It is this ridding of stereotypes that has made the project worthwhile. A Lebanese student isn't a terrorist, radical fundamentalist or a statistic in a foreign country. A Canadian student is no longer a rich capitalist or a movie star.

This letter exchange has given faces to people on opposite sides of the ocean. In these tiny spaces of friendship, I see God acting to build bridges instead of walls and to bring hope to our violent world.