Friendship comes in the mail | SN.at

“Pen pal initiative” connects people in times of pandemic.

E-mail, Twitter, WhatsApp are part of everyday life for many. A handwritten letter in the mailbox has become a rarity. The joy is all the greater when personal messages actually flutter into the house – especially during the pandemic, when contacts are very limited.

The psychologist Sylvia Hintersteiner from Amstetten has also noticed how difficult isolation can be for people who live alone and who are sometimes not so used to dealing with new media. So in May 2020 she launched the “Pen pal initiative”. More than 100 items were received, and the most distant letter came from Berlin, says Hintersteiner. She also received a few letters of thanks because the pen pals were very nice. For the psychologist, however, it became more and more noticeable that younger people were also getting tired of digitization. Therefore, she will continue the “pen pal initiative” and invite those interested to “embark on a very real, tangible pen pal adventure”. As a teenager, she herself had a pen pal in the USA and resumed this friendship after 25 years, said Hintersteiner.

If you are interested in a pen friendship, write a letter to an unknown person, put it in a stamped envelope and only write the sender on it – no recipient. This envelope is then put into another and sent to the “Initiative Brieffreund”, PO Box 012, 3300 Amstetten. Hintersteiner is “the lucky fairy”, as she says, and sends the letters on at random.

–