As President of a non-profit called Vision-Aid, an organization that helps visually challenged poor in India, I often get to read letters from people who are offering help and asking how they can help us achieve our goals. One recent email letter we received was from a teenage girl in the U.S. who said she wanted a email pal from India. She particularly asked if we could connect her with a blind girl who was her age. We forwarded her request to our center in India and within days a blind girl in India connected with a teenage girl from the U.S via email. One of our tutors at the center translated the email that came from the U.S. And within a week the two very different girls connected and exchanged stories of their lives and asked questions about each other, becoming very good friends! The most touching part was that while the girl from the U.S received pictures, via email, of her pal, the girl in India received a voice message from her pal and it was through that voice that she imagined her American friend, miles away from her, totally different from her, yet someone who had become her best friend and her window into the land she only heard about - America!
While we have been thinking about various ways to use the internet for our programs, this simple idea had never occurred to us! It took a girl, who had a mission in mind, to send us an email with her request to make this happen. Given how happy the girl in India is with her email pal, we are now creating a program with this idea!
