I think my English class in high school the year before I was in it had their pupils write letters to people in Gambia but me personally no.
My eighth-grade French class had French pen pals. After a few letters, mine requested that I critique his English. I did, and never heard from him again.
Ah, a sad story . . .
When I was 10 I became a penpal with another 10-year-old girl in Denmark (I don’t recall how this happened, it may have been through a school program). I wrote her a long letter that included details about being a Mormon, though it was mostly about my cats, friends, siblings, and so on.
I sent the letter off via AirMail, it was all very exciting!
A month later I received a short letter back that basically said “I am unable to be your penpal because of your weird religion.” 
I was pretty shattered.
Even when many more people used to write letters, mostly they were really boring to read.
I have had many decades-long epistolary friendships. I just wrote a letter today to my friend of 45 years standing who lives across the continent. With a 1940’s US-made fountain pen, in a dark teal ink from the Netherlands, on thick smooth cream colored paper.
The truth is, though, letter writing is a pleasure only fully realized by highly literate, creative persons with interesting lives, a sense of leisure, and good penmanship. That is to say, a small and ever-dwindling pool. Some of my most faithful and fascinating correspondents are now dead. Others no longer can write anything long, due to arthritis. Or would rather phone, now that it is so very inexpensive to do so. I don’t exchange many letters these days, sadly.
In the pre-internet, pre-cell phone days when I was a 17 year old guy looking to meet girls, I answered an ad in a teen mag from a girl who was looking for pen pals. Or she answered one that I had posted, I can’t remember. Teen mags in those days tended to post such ads for free, and it was always fun to get letters from a bunch of strange girls.
Anyway, we corresponded for a while. We had lots of common interests and she seemed very intelligent and a fun person. I lived in Massachusetts, she was from Brooklyn, NY. Which was quite a trip for one who had no car, but not insurmountable. I was really starting to like her, and was trying to think of how I could get to Brooklyn to see her in person, where I would stay, etc. Then I realized she had never actually told me how old she was. So I asked. And, in her next letter, she answered. She was twelve.
We actually kept corresponding for a while after that, but any thoughts of a meeting were quickly put aside. I suppose if I had met her 10 years later, something could have come of it, but at that point, she was just a little kid in my eyes.
I have one fond memory of her, though. In one of her letters, she sent me a poem she had written. It was free verse, but I set it to music anyway, and sent her a copy of the sheet. She seemed unimpressed, and shortly after that was when we stopped writing to each other. But 47 years have now gone by since I wrote that song, and I still play it nearly every time I pick up my guitar. I think it’s one of the prettiest melodies I ever composed, and it works perfectly with her words. I wonder sometimes if she is still out there somewhere and what she would think of that song if she heard it after all these years.
I picked up a few when I travelled to the 1964-65 World’s Fair in NYC(yes, I am THAT old) The Parker Pen(remember fountain pens?) Pavillon had a computer to match you up with folks of like interests world-wide. Had penpals in Italy, Nigeria and Indonesia.
More recently had a few penpals who were also quilt makers like I am. Two very nice women, one in England and one in Holland. We swapped stories and tips. I’d send them stuff they couldn’t afford over there, seems fabric et al are almost prohibitively expensive. They in turn would send me lovely handmade items, which I still cherish.
This thread may prompt me to see if I can scare up a few new penpals. 
I had two when I was in high school, both of whom found my name and address in the letter column of a comic book.
One was a young girl in Jamaica. We exchanged a few nice letters, then she asked me to send her “a pair of shoes for the summer holiday.” I had no idea what she was referring to, so I asked her to explain. She wrote again asking me to send her all sorts of expensive things. I got a bit confused and freaked out, and stopped writing.
The other was a fellow a little younger than me, who turned out to be a word and logic puzzle nut like me, only even more so. We exchanged letters and puzzles for a year or two, but gradually the letters got less frequent, and stopped.
I did as recently as a few years ago thanks to the wonder known as Omegle.
For those who don’t know, Omegle is a random chat website that puts two people anonymously together to talk about whatever. Full disclosure: It’s mostly 13 year old boys looking to have video sex with girls. But I was using it because I was desperately lonely and I just wanted someone to talk to.
After many hours fruitless searching I was able to make friends with girls from Washington State and D.C. and one from L.A., and a nice girl named Julia who lived in Brazil.
We eventually exchanged Skypes and I’ve had regular conversations with them up until, oh, maybe only 2 years ago.
I think of them often and wonder what they’re up to, but they (nor I) ever use Skype anymore…
I’ve got one now. A few years ago, I was part of a group of people who watched a tv show and made comments about it on facebook. We did this for a few seasons. Some of us kept up with each other over the interim between seasons. We had a post card exchange. Later one of the women decided to drop out of all social media, but we still exchange postcards. It’s a fun little art collection.
As a school requirement in a class around 4th or 5th grade we were to start having pen pal relations with a class somewhere else. We would write letters back and forth once a month. I remember both being disgusted because school was forcing us to do this - and send photos of ourselves (this felt like some sort of breach of privacy to me, though I couldn’t articulate it) - and sort of excited, because my pen pal seemed nice and ok and a new friend would be nice. Then it was arranged that we would all get to go to a park and have fun together, our whole class with our whole pen pal class. Of course once we were all there my pen pal wanted NOTHING to do with me. In fact, most of each other’s classes wanted nothing to do with one another. We’d all been forced into this by our schools, after all, at the age when cliques become serious business. It was the only obvious outcome when you think about it. So most of our class got together in groups and grumbled that our pen pals were all jerks after all and played by ourselves, while they probably did the same thing.
Our school also had an internal pen pal system for math where the 5th graders would write diaries about math homework to the 6th graders, who then tried to fix our mistakes. Except they were 6th graders and not really any better at math than we were, and we got incorrect answers all the time.
To be honest I think my school system had a lot of stupid ideas like that.
In grade school, I had a pen pal in Rhode Island. 3 grade maybe. We corresponded for a year or so. What I remember most fondly about the experience is that I was more than a little fuzzy about her address. I would send it to Her Name in Rhode Island. I think I would manage the city sometimes, but I’m not positive on that point. She would get the letters. :eek: No zip. No street.
I lived in LA, where such things would never have happened unless I was the post office’s special pet project. I thought the entire thing was so cool.
Still do. One of my correspondents doesn’t have a computer, or even a typewriter. He hand-writes his letters to me.
(My responses are word-processed and inkjet printed.)
Nice chap, tho’ a bit of a luddite.
I had a French pen pal in high school. We started our correspondence when her family decided to accept American students for a brief stay, and we continued to write to each other for a couple years after my visit to France.
I also had a brief correspondence in Esperanto with a young woman in Vladivostok.
Neither of them lasted a very long time, but yes, they were both pen pals.
Yes, in high school. I think I got the addresses from 16 Magazine or something like that.
Most lasted a year or so, but one lasted about three years. I was Beatles and London crazy, so I chose girls from England and was fascinated at everything hey did, even though it was just go to school and live a normal life.
Around 1950, it was actually interesting. I had a pen pal in Sweden for a couple of years, and in those days, it took about three weeks for an exchange of letters, so it was something to look forward to. His English was bettre than mine, as was his penmanship and writing skills and general knowledge so it was pretty humbling. But it was great to get an envelope in the mail with Swedish stamps on it, because in those days, anything at all that was not Made in USA was a curiosity worth taking to show and tell. Like, look at this interesting dish towel, it was made in England. You didn’t get several robocalls every day that were dialed in Russia, or talk to somebody in India about your bank balance. In those days, talking to somebody on the phone in India for a minute would be an experience of a lifetime, now it is just regarded with contempt and Americans gratuitously insult them. I still love chatting with call center workers in distant lands, most of them I’ve traveled to their country, and we can have a nice conversation.
Now, I could have all the penpals I wanted in exotic countries, there are about 20 a day soliciting me in my spam folder, with flashing red hearts in the subject line. The novelty has worn off.
Maybe my most interesting, and the last of the pre-internet era, was in the 70s,when I got a short wave radio, and as a hobby, started sending out DX reports and collecting QSL cards. With my QSL from Radio Tashkent, in the Uzbek SSR (then Soviet Union), there was a nice hand-written note from a young lady who worked there. I wrote back and thanked her, and that led to a few exchanges of very nice personal letters in what in the 70s was still a very exotic place. I wish I had kept her name, because last year I was a few hours bus ride from Tashkent, it would have been fun to look her up.
I had loads. At age 17 I went looking for some in an Australian pop music magazine (while I was in NZ) and got many responses, one of whom became a long-term friend. I am still in contact with her online (in fact she had her birthday last weekend).
Then later, at age 21, I did it again in a NZ music magazine and had many pen friends from that one, regularly corresponding with five or six people (all in NZ, except for one in San Francisco) for two or three years, some I met up with. Not sure where they all are now, though. Oh, here’s one of them.
Several. I’m in still in touch with one of them via Facebook.
I had quite a few. In the pre-internet days, it made the outside world seem closer. Sometimes, just because of the randomness of the matching services, you could get paired with people with whom you really had nothing in common, but it could still turn into an interesting correspondence–an elderly man who had been in a country band, a teenage boy from Scotland, a young Orthodox woman from Israel. I was writing to one woman in Europe who off-handedly mentioned that her father, who had taken off some years before, was from the US. Turned out he was from a city about 100 miles from me, and I was able to put her in touch with a newspaper columnist who had a sort of missed connections feature, and through that she was able to reconnect with her father’s family. She eventually came to see them, and she and I got to meet up. Another time, I was going through a rough time, and a male penpal wired flowers to me. He had no idea how much they would cost, so apparently he just said something like, “Well, how about $500? Will $500 do?” For years after that whenever I would run into the florist, she’d go on and on about those flowers. It was…a lot of flowers. Oh, and I had the woman in Jamaica who sent me a list of all the presents she wanted me to send her. She also sent me a photo of herself wearing a flesh-colored leotard. A ripped flesh-colored leotard. I’m a woman. A straight woman. I am not sure how this was supposed to make me send her presents.
Sometimes; even now. I am one of those odd dinosaurs who stills enjoys snail-mail and I trade notes with a couple people I’ve never met in person. Mostly on technical/hobby things we have in common, how we found each other, more than the more “wanna write back and forth?” thing I did as a kid. But I have a lot of fun with it.