I don’t know if the acronym means anything to you. It was a cool fad during the later part of my grade school years and lasted way into our high school years. IYS stands for International Youth Service.
Long before email and online friends, there was mail (now called snail mail) and pen pals or pen friends. I will use “pen friends” because “pen pals” is more colloquial, they are the ones you see at the back pages of comics and magazine, together with the want ads.
IYS is a paid pen friend service based in Finland. You sign a form requesting a pen friend, enumerate four possible countries (where you want your friend to come from) and pay 25 pesos (equivalent to maybe 150 pesos if you factor in inflation). A month after, you will get a name with a legit address and the rest, as they say, is juvenile international correspondence history.
I remember that to avoid the extra postal charge for sending money as payment, we will place the money between carbon papers so that the postal service will not decipher the pesos inside. And seal it with a prayer that the form and money will find its way to Finland.
There is even an IYS promo wherein if you get 10 people to sign-up (and pay), you will get a pen friend for free. Or sometimes, you will get a mail from out the blue. Meaning, IYS sent your name to someone who paid for a pen friend.
Other than books, writing to my pen friends was the hobby of my growing up years. It reached a point when I had ten pen friends at the same time, mostly from Europe. I even had two from Czechoslovakia; only because you get bragging rights for having a friend in a country most people cannot even spell. I can still remember some of their names. There is Renata Kabelkova (the correct spelling of her surname escapes me) from Czechoslovakia who sent me a photo of herself (in black and white glory) as a kid feeding a swan in a pond. There’s Liz Smith from England who will send me stick chewing gums (which I never ate, of course) in her letters and who gave me a UK calendar as a Christmas present.
Back then, we asked Santa for the possibility of our pen friend visiting the Philippines. I have ten chances for this dream to come true. A child can dream, right? I was under the impression then that anyone with blond hair and blue eyes are filthy rich.
I remember that some of my pen friend’s English are really bad. This served as my training ground for the editing jobs I will handle later in life. I also remember people saying IYS is a hoax and only a roomful of people are writing those letters. True or not, those letters became my elixir of life back then. I am getting letters almost every week and the distinctive roar of the mailman’s motorcycle infuses excitement onto the boring days of my pre-pubescent period.
Maybe one of these days, I will search for my old pen friends online and see if they still remember me. The boy from the Philippines (a country they often misspell; yes, like Czechoslovakia) who writes in almost perfect English, has nice cursive and loves to send post cards featuring beaches and mountains.
A boy who saves his allowance just to buy stationary, post cards and postage stamps. Just to be able to touch a life on the other side of the world.
Update: I tried looking photos of IYS for this blog. It was then that I discovered that IYS closed down June of 2008. Internet killed the pen-and-paper star.
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