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Last summer I took a rainy evening to sort through the hundreds of papers that littered my bedroom floor. There were old school documents, doodles from when I was 5, drafts of horrible essays I'd rather burn than read again, and letters. Letters were like the prize at the bottom of a cereal box.

I opened an old textbook and found a letter from a girl in Uganda. When I was around 10 one of my mother's friends had asked me if I wanted to become a pen pal.

The name of my far-away friend was Lorna, a girl a few years older than I, who lived all the way in Africa. That in itself was DAUNTING. What was Africa like? What was Uganda like? Would Lorna be happy to be my pen pal? I had written her the first letter of our friendship and asked my mother to mail it off as fast as she could. A month or two later, I got a response. Lorna told me about her family, what school was like, her favorite classes and the teachers she admired. She even sent a leaf from the tree in her backyard along with the letter.

We wrote each other a few times, but after a few letters from both sides, we lost contact. Maybe it was the mundane things that each of us got caught up in, or maybe pen pals were too much of a responsibility for two kids. Either way, I had lost a friend, and at the time, I didn't realize how much of a loss it was.

I grabbed a new sheet of paper and began writing.

I wondered whether my letter would reach Lorna, or if she'd ever write me back.

One day last week, I woke up and shuffled to the kitchen to make my breakfast when I spotted a worn and old-looking brown letter sitting on the dining room table. I saw the stamp had the word UGANDA typed across it. Screaming like I was 6 and trying my hardest not to shred the letter inside the envelope, I unfolded the letter and began reading it aloud to my younger sister and my mother, who were sitting at the table.

Lorna told me about her final exams, how the teachers were unfair with grading, and about the local harvest festival being held in her neighborhood.

In the years I hadn't talked to my friend, I learned about the world through the news on the radio and stories on TV, and I was scared of what the world was becoming. War, genocide and the conflicts between distant countries make it hard to imagine the day when we become a more tolerant world and learn to treat one another as companions instead of enemies.

That letter in my hand made me realize that I connected with a girl on the other side of the world simply by talking about our everyday lives. I realized my own ability to connect with someone on a personal level, even when that person lives in a place and culture I can only imagine. It gave me hope that maybe someday we as a global community can connect with each other and create a better world.

What would the world be like, I wonder, if everyone had a pen pal? Those places far away from home wouldn't feel as alien as before. Children would grow up understanding that sometimes all it takes to bridge the seemingly huge divides between continents and cultures is a simple pen and paper.

Getting Lorna's letter broke down the barriers that I had built in my mind. I wasn't a girl from America, and she wasn't a girl from Africa. We are Margo and Lorna.