About the Story.
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This is a true story about a second grade class and the letters they wrote and illustrated to Mawill, a boy their age from the Philippines. It all started one day when the teacher read a letter to her class from an organization called Children International. This is what it said: “Mawill is a six year old boy who lives in a one-room cement block house in a poor neighborhood in Manila, the capital city of the Philippines, an island nation in the Pacific Ocean. His parents can’t afford to supply him with what he needs in order to attend school there. Our organization is looking for someone to help him go to school and get the health care he needs. We are asking you to sponsor him by sending a monthly donation of $20. Our workers there will use that money to buy him a decent pair of shoes, proper clothes for school, and items his parents can’t afford, like toothbrushes, towels and soap.”
After reading the letter, the teacher asked her students if they were interested in being penpals with Mawill. Everyone agreed it was a great idea, so once a month during the school year, they wrote and illustrated letters to their new friend across the Pacific ocean. Mawill, with the help of his teacher, wrote back and drew pictures of the plants and animals that lived on this tropical island, so different from those in Northern California!
The students in the class were not from poor families, and none had ever been to the Philippines, so being penpals helped them understand what life was like for someone very different from themselves. Some of them wanted to go there and meet Mawill - only a few thousand miles away! In November, the students voted to do a bake sale to raise funds to buy some extra holiday gifts for their penpal. They raised $75 to give Mawill a very special Christmas, one he’d never forget! The students appreciated the chance to help someone who lived in poverty, and they were able to learn about how much their efforts meant to him when they read his friendly letters. This teacher continued the pen pal project with Mawill until he graduated from high school in 2019, In his last letter to his teacher and her class he wrote, “I hope you can and will help more children in the future. I will never forget you. I thank you for everything!”
