I have to relay an incredible story my dad emailed me yesterday:
"On Monday we got a letter with a foreign postmark. I couldn't tell where it was from. Inside was a letter from a Russian family thanking us for a charitable gift they had received 12 years earlier. As I remember the charity drive was sponsored by Mom’s work and had to do with a famine or crisis in the Russian far east. [It was the early 90s right after the Soviet Union broke apart—hard times for a lot of people.] I think we were asked at the time to include a family picture and address with the contributions we sent to them. Apparently this Russian family has kept our family picture in a revered spot and finally wondered if it was possible to actually talk to a family in the USA. They gave a complete rundown on how their family is doing since our gift arrived. It blows my mind that me, a retired Air Force officer would be corresponding with a retired officer from the Red Army. Go figure."
Just when I’m ready to give up hope in humanity something like this comes along. You send twenty bucks to Africa after one of those TV pleas from Sally Struthers or Indonesia after the tsunami, maybe some kind of modest care package to go with it, and you forget about the whole thing before long. But perhaps you actually do more good than you’ve imagined. Apparently my parents’ gift to this family in Russia really meant something, and it’s very touching to think of some hungry, downtrodden family amidst the unforgiving tundra near Siberia being helped significantly by a gift that probably wasn’t all that huge by American standards. And by the way, these were not exactly peasants: the father of that family was an economist, and the mother was a speech therapist. If they were starving you know it was pretty bad there.
Then there is the backstory behind the gift and the relationship it created. As my dad mentioned, the patriarch of that Russian family had served in the Soviet military at the same time my dad was in the Air Force. People forget so quickly what the Cold War felt like, but the threat of nuclear war was at least as scary as the current age of terror. And living in the US or the USSR of course gave you a heightened sense of vulnerability. I remember seeing the movie Red Dawn as a kid and saying, "Gee Dad, a war like that would never really happen, would it?" And he said something to the effect of, "Well, actually it could." Even 14 years after the Soviet Union ceased to exist, I feel comforted that these old enemies can symbolically break bread through the mail. It gives me hope for today's Bin Laden and Bush-bred morass.
Coincidentally, a few days ago Valarie also resumed correspondence with a pen pal in Sheffield, England who she has never met but first began writing back and forth with many years ago after bonding in an Oasis fans’ chatroom. (I’ve since bonded with him over NFL football.) I think it’s great when people in different countries find a way to meet each other can correspond. It could be through the privileged helping the needy, like with my parents and that Russian family and dramatized so hilariously in the movie About Schmidt (“Life is short, Ndugu…”). Or it could be like Valarie and her Gallagher-groupie friend: socioeconomic equals who happen to live a few thousand miles apart.
These days there is increasingly a global cultural divide best summed up by the title of that book “Jihad Versus McWorld”. I doubt many people in Afghanistan or Iraq have computers and DSL, but there ought to be a way for individuals like us to put a more human face to each other’s respective cultures…just like it has for my dad and those commie-Ruskies.
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