NORTHRIDGE : Youths Finally Put Down Their Pens, Celebrate

Northridge Middle School had planned to celebrate its massive letter-writing campaign to earthquake victims in Kobe, Japan, two weeks ago, but the students had other things on their minds.

Responding to the April 19 tragedy in Oklahoma City, the students had picked up their pens again to express sympathy for students affected by the bombing of the federal building there.

Then, as part of a U. S. Postal Service program called “Let’s Write,” the school sent four students to about 50 schools in Oklahoma City to help hand-deliver hundreds of letters paralleling the Oklahomans’ experience with that of local residents after the Northridge earthquake.

Their journey was dubbed “Operation Children” by postal officials.

With the Oklahoma City letters delivered and another batch of correspondence on its way to Japan, the Northridge Middle School students were finally able to celebrate Wednesday.

More than 100 crowded inside the school library to receive a series of oral “thank-yous” from postal officials and the Japanese Consulate in Los Angeles, as well as from students and teachers who had flown in from Oklahoma City.

“Your kindness will be remembered long after the traces of destruction have been taken away from our landscape,” Japanese Consul Minoru Kikuchi told the students. “To know that children from another part of the world care about their situation encourages the people of Kobe to continue rebuilding their community and their lives.

“It exemplifies humanity at its finest,” Kikuchi added.

The Let’s Write program began about 18 months ago as an effort to help schoolchildren in several U. S. cities better understand their world by communicating with students living in different areas and under different circumstances.

It was expanded to Japan when Northridge science and math teacher Laura Wada, who taught English for a year in Osaka, a town near Kobe, initiated letter-writing and relief efforts with some of her classes.

The Postal Service heard of Wada’s idea and invited the entire school to become part of Let’s Write.

“After the Northridge earthquake, we received an overwhelming amount of letters and donations from people all over the world,” Wada said. “They helped us a lot. We wanted to return the favor to someone else.”

“Hopefully, the cycle will continue with others,” she added.

Students and teachers from Oklahoma City were at Wednesday’s event to inform Wada and the others that the cycle of sympathy Wada spoke of is running at full tilt.

Both Vivian Davis) and Dain Walker, fifth-graders from an Oklahoma City school located near the ruins of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, read letters they had written to the Kobe victims.

“I’m sorry about the earthquake in your city,” Vivian Davis read. “But you know that it’s Mother Nature’s doing.

“We’ve had some difficult times, too. Maybe you’ve heard about it. I pray this will never happen again and hope we can meet sometime.”