A Letter to A New Penpal

Hi! my name is Grace, I'm 26 years old and I'm from the San Francisco Area, in California, USA. I am a double degree major and currently studying Civil Engineering. I want to provide clean water for people in third world countries after graduation.

I love traveling to new places and learning languages. I enjoy reading books. :) I hope that someday I could visit Italy. I like writing letters, watching movies, reading and hanging out with friends. I like to write and also in my free time I write books and have published four books.

Please write something about you, your life, your job, your dreams and what makes you happy.

Hi Grace, how do you do?
My name is Nadia. I'm 22 years old. I'm an architecture student. I live in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. And I am Indonesian. As you know, Indonesia is one of the third world countries that you mentioned in your profile.

As an architecture student and a member of the third world, I do understand what you said earlier about water crisis. Let me tell you about Indonesia, my own nation, Grace.

Indonesia actually has a lot of nature resources. Just name it; gas oil, forests, woods, birds, beaches, mountains, gold minings, everything. We are rich of nature. We can call it: just like a piece of heaven falling to the earth.

But what happen now, Grace? Everytime you watch Indonesian news on television, they are bad news. There is no future of Indonesia. Everytime you go out to the streets, junctions, corners, underbridges, and riverbeds, you can find a lot of hunger people right there. The goverment do nothing. Yeah maybe just a little and the rest of them, they do corrupt.

I do really love Indonesia, Grace. I'm a native and the most fluent language for me is Bahasa Indonesia. I can't thinking about living in other place but Indonesia.

But this country makes me sick. This country makes me believe that there is no justice exist in this world. What a cruel fact that I and the young Indonesians had to face in front of us.

We are, Indonesian youngsters do not have hope for the better future of Indonesia if we do nothing. We can't depend on the goverment nor the president. So we do what we can do.

So there are many youth movements in Indonesia nowadays. Some young Indonesians do demonstrations in front of parliament buildings. They fight for justice, humanity, human rights, and for a better place to living in. The other young people do research in their own educations. The other try the best for their works. Another young Indonesians do community services, examples: giving free education for poor children, giving healthcare for poor people, and making improvement based on local community.

The picture in my first postcard shows a beatiful beach in Belitong Island. What do you think about that beach, Grace? Beatiful, isn't it? But you know, that beautiful island has many complicated problems. Especially water problem. I did two months last year doing community services to try solving the problem. My second postcard shows you a publication of Yogyakarta-Netpac Asian Film Festival 2011. I joined watching the festival. This is one of youth movements we do to make a better future of Indonesia.

This is my first letter. If you want to ask something, questions about Indonesia, I will try my best to answering your questions,

I sent you a map of Yogyakarta City and the entire Yogyakarta Hadiningrat Royal Family names written in the back side.

Hope you will be happy received my post cards. I'm sorry if you don't have any idea what i am talking about. I'm not really good in English. But I love watching The Mentalist Series, they are from California, your city, aren't they? Hehe.

See you someday, Grace!
Cheers!