CORONA DEL MAR : Filipino Pen Pal May Get Visitor

In 1987, Kristen Campbell and her Harbor Day School classmates wrote letters, sealed them in bottles and dropped them in the ocean off Baja California as part of their studies on early explorers and how they used ocean currents to navigate the globe.

Three years and about 8,000 miles later, Kristen’s bottle landed in the Philippines.

Ian Hapa, 14, found the bottle while walking on the beach at Patnanungan, a small island. The note included Kristen’s name and the address of the school. It explained that she was studying about ocean explorers.

“It was early in the morning of Jan. 15, 1990, when I was on my way along the beach of Patnanungan Island, walking alone as a part of my relaxation, when I see a bottle floating on the water where I found your letter inside it,” Ian wrote Kristen. “I was glad upon reading it and right away I go home, take a ballpen and paper and write this letter.”

Ian, who said his parents have a rice field and coconut plantation on Patnanungan, has been communicating, off and on, with Kristen, her teacher, Judy d’Albert, and others in the class.

Touched by his “warm and wonderful letters,” d’Albert and Corona del Mar resident Susan Strader have asked Norma Vander Molen to try to establish contact with Ian. Vander Molen, a resident of Huntington Beach, is going on a church mission to the Philippines later this month.

“We want to let him know we care, that we appreciate his wonderful letters and that we will keep in touch,” d’Albert said Monday.

“He’s striving so hard to improve himself and doing so well in school,” d’Albert said. “There’s always hope, if you keep on trying and never give up.”

Ian, who wrote that he aspires to be an engineer, has sent d’Albert his high school graduation picture. He wants to work for peace and humanity, d’Albert said. He’s also a big basketball fan.

D’Albert is sending him a Lakers shirt via Vander Molen, a former Huntington Beach City School District trustee. Vander Molen is participating with 10 other members of St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church of Newport Beach on a short-term project, working with impoverished people in the Philippines.

Strader, who with her husband, Timothy, dropped the youngsters’ bottles in the water off Baja California, is sending a dual time zone clock. Her previous efforts to make contact with Ian through other intermediaries were never successful, Strader said Monday.

“I’m delighted to help,” Vander Molen said. “I’m certainly going to try. God works in mysterious ways. I’m amazed. This has come out of nowhere.”

Kristen, whose note set off the correspondence, is now a 16-year-old student at Corona del Mar High School. She said she had forgotten about her note in the bottle until she received the letter from Ian in 1990.

She said she found it interesting to learn about him and his country, adding that she thinks “it’s great” that Vander Molen is going to try to find her friend.

D’Albert said that Kristen’s bottle probably rode the North Equatorial Current west to Asia, a journey of at least 8,000 miles.

“It could have washed ashore on one of the thousands of uninhabited atolls,” she said. “It’s a miracle that it made it as far as it did--and then to be found by someone fluent in English.”