Hey Reader,

A couple of years ago my youngest daughter went away to a summer camp that pushed her limits of comfort. Coming off this experience, she would say things like: “Mom, you know I’m more of a hotel girl, than a tent girl, right?”

Despite her misery, she wrote home, penning this postcard, and mailed it through the postal system:

Somehow this reached Mom and Dad, despite having no name, no stamp, or really much of an address to go on.

Some letter-writing campaigns are just that improbable. But yet, they still find their way.

The Colombian Physicist Paola Tello Guerrero can also explain how she delivered an unlikely package of letters.

In order to get to Antarctica, the participants of Homeward Bound, the organization that put together the expedition that I took part in back in 2018 to Antarctica, had to find ways to fund their trips.

So Paola decided to raise money by running workshops for school-age children, called Antártida para Valientes, in her home country of Colombia.

One day, the kids were acting up and being unruly, so she suggested that they sit down quietly and write a letter to the penguins that she would be meeting soon in Antarctica.

This was meant to calm them down, so that she could get back to the serious business of teaching them about climate change, and the loss of penguin habitat.

At the end of the day, she collected the letters and took them home with her. Later that night, she opened up the bag, and sat down to read them.

The letters took her aback. They were personal, and thoughtful, curious and beautiful.

She realized that she had to make good on her promise, and indeed, deliver these letters to the penguins of Antarctica.

To do this, she enlisted the help of the Spanish-speaking participants of the ship, who sat down to help translate these letters, first into English, and then a number of participants then translated them back into their mother-tongues.

And then, we gathered, in a semicircle on rocky outcropping of the Antarctic Peninsula one day, and helped her to make good on her promise to deliver these letters to a waddle of penguins.

You never really know what language the penguins will understand, so we covered our bases.

Here’s a super short sample of what that sounded like, brought to you, by Audio Love.​

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Best,

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