Learning About Others

When events were cancelled and many places of business closed due to COVID-19 last summer, Josie Mainord wondered how to give back to the community while staying socially distanced. Mainord, who was then the community service chair for her sorority Sigma Sigma Sigma at Southeast Missouri State University (SEMO), reached out to her family friend Tammy Brands, a registered nurse at Bertrand Nursing and Rehab Center in Bertrand, Mo., asking if she thought the residents would be interested in doing a pen pal system with the sorority. Brands said yes, and the Pen Pal System was born.

Doris Wheatley, a resident at Bertrand Nursing and Rehab Center in Bertrand, Mo., shows a letter she received from her pen pal, a member of Sigma Sigma Sigma at Southeast Missouri State University. Wheatley says she enjoyed learning about the young women's lives through their letters.

“I kind of wanted to find something that would keep us connected with people over a time, and I thought it would be really cool for our girls to kind of listen and see experiences that other people have had and for [the residents] to see what we’re experiencing,” says Mainord, who is a sophomore at SEMO from New Madrid, Mo. “It is a different world now from when they were our age in college.”

More than 60 members of her sorority signed up to write letters, while approximately 50 people at Bertrand Nursing and Rehab Center expressed interest in having a pen pal. To ensure each member of the sorority had a pen pal and to spread more joy to area residents, the sorority expanded the project to include a nursing home in Illinois, as well.

Mainord says she wrote her pen pal six letters over the course of the fall semester, writing about how her sorority is involved in the community, different things happening in her life, and updates on school and the Cape Girardeau community. She says Brands told her that when residents received a letter, the atmosphere in the nursing home became filled with excitement. Mainord says that was her hope for the project: to make a positive impact in others’ lives during a time that was “so crazy and uncertain.”

Casimira Taylor, a freshman member of Sigma Sigma Sigma from Puxico, Mo., received two letters from her pen pal, in which her pen pal told her about his life and encouraged her in her studies to become a nurse.

“Just impacting the other elderly people in the nursing home and everything, I really enjoyed doing that,” Taylor says. “I received a couple letters back, and I just thought it was so cool to learn about somebody else.”

Although she was initially hesitant to participate in the project because she was worried she wouldn’t have enough time to write letters, Taylor thought of her own grandparents and the fact that she didn’t want them to be lonely during the COVID-19 quarantine; this helped her decide she wanted to help brighten someone else’s day, too. Through participating in the project, she says she learned to reach outside of her comfort zone to do something to benefit another person.

Her and her sorority sisters’ efforts were not in vain; Brands says the residents enjoyed getting to learn about other people and hearing the college students’ stories. Doris Wheatley, a resident at Bertrand Nursing and Rehab Center who participated in the letter exchange, testifies to that.

“I think it is good for the older people in the nursing home to learn about and get to know the younger generation,” Wheatley says. “It’s always nice to get mail, especially during this time when we don’t get to have visitors.”