A new year of love between Syria and Mumbai

It is time to cheer as the beginning of 2018 hundreds of Indian school children will make new friends with their counterparts from Bangladesh, Syria, Iraq and Yazidi. Under the initiative of Letters of Love that was started in 2015, for the first time the Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) is going to build a friendship through letters between the refugee children of several war prone countries with Indian kids.

In the age of digitisation, the concept of pen friend has almost vanish, but this new year, this new concept of pen friend to broom a fresh air of friendship between the children of these countries through hand written letters.

With every year, we make one resolution that we always forget to pursue, but the ‘Letters of Love’ that was started in 2015 never does. In fact, this year, they have taken up the initiative to make the love between refugee children stronger.

The brainchild of Pooja Pradeep, a 25-year-old teacher, Letters of Love that was started under the guidance of (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) UNHCRGaziantep, Turkey, with the aim of reaching out to the tens of thousands of Syrian, Iraqi, Yazidi and Rohingya refugee children in Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon and Bangladesh with smiles, on the occasion of New Year’s.

“As a member of the UNHCR coilation, we will be using our network of 20,000 plus youth to sign the petition to send messages to decision makers and world leaders that they must act with solidarity and shared responsibility to ease the plight of refugees. It also means we are a part of a larger network of remarkable organisations who work towards the same goal,” said Pooja Pradeep, founder of Letters of Love.

The Letters of Love team with its branches in Israel, Palestine, Egypt, Syria and the USA, send handwritten postcards to these little kids and aims to instil empathy in young thinkers and sensitise them into thinking critically using different perspectives.

“What inspires me every day is our youngest team member and our lead Student Ambassador - Gabby, a 13-year-old girl from Alaska who constantly keeps brainstorming with me of the numerous ways we can all make a difference to the global refugee crises. With her, I have discovered bringing about change needn't be a fairy tale with a happy ending. It is rather a live spinning reel of doing whatever you can, with whatever you have, wherever you are,” she added.

Pooja and her team are all set to launch the ‘Pen Pal Project’, which will facilitate writing letters between students from India and kids entrapped in wartorn Syria.

“In addition, the team has also initiated a Pen Pal project, which will focus on fostering friendships between 500 children in Mumbai who would write to the refugee kids in warzones in Syria, refugee kids in Turkey and those under siege in Gaza,” added Pooja.

While most (in fact, all) at the head of peace-making talks between nations would involve adults, there is a reason why Pradeep, an engineer graduate who became a teacher by choice, has involved children to be at the centrestage of her project.

“As we grow in a word fuelled with bigotry and intolerance, we lose touch with that streak of compassion that we had as kids. So, if you show children that there is a way to be kind, they will take it, and in fact, lead it,” she says.