How a letter gets from here to Hotzeplotz

We've had a few questions lately about how to write letters to the kids at Soviestk so we thought that we should post a bit about how the whole process works. By the way, thanks so much for your interest in writing to the kids. We can never emphasize enough how meaningful these letters are to the kids.

Once you've written a letter and sent it off to HopeChest's headquarters in Colorado, it will get translated into Russian. If you hand write a letter, the child will receive your original version along with a translated version. Then comes the task of actually getting the letter to the child in Russia. In order to save money, letters often travel to Russia with a HopeChest group from the U.S. Fortunately, HopeChest sends groups quite often. Once the letter arrives in Russia, then it will find its way to the region where your pen pal lives through another group of Americans traveling to that region. The letter finally arrives at the orphanage through one of the in-country HopeChest staff and is then delivered to your pen pal.

The next step is for the discipler to encourage the child to write back to you. They love receiving letters, but do not necessarily write back quite as readily. There are a variety of reasons that we've found for some of the kids not writing back. Sometimes they're too shy or have poor eyesight or don't know how to write. But don't let that discourage you. We've received a number of wonderful, heartwarming, and even funny letters back from the kids at Sovietsk and elsewhere. So, once you pen pal does write back to you, the process starts all over again but in reverse. The letter is sent to Moscow, translated into English, hitches a ride to America, then finds its way through the postal service to your front door.

Another option that expedites this whole process is to send letters to the kids via e-mail. You can either write the letter in the body of an e-mail or send it as an attached Word document. This option, of course, cuts out all of the travel time that a snail mail letter goes through. This is the option that I usually go with, simply because it's faster (not to mention my deplorable handwriting).

Thank you again for your continued interest in helping the kids at Sovietsk. For more information about the particular do's and don'ts of letter writing, please look along the right side of this web page or leave a comment on this post and we'll get back to you.