An Answer From Out of the Blue

Angelita Woodworth, a teacher at Sunset Lane Elementary School, wondered what had happened to a bottle of letters that her third-grade students dropped in the ocean nine years ago.

The school heard recently from Franklin Jimenez Sanchez, a 31-year-old pastor of a church in Heredia, Costa Rica. He wrote that he found the letters on a local beach.

He had written once before, he said in his letter, but received no response, so he wrote again. School officials said they never received the first letter, which was mailed five years ago.

The second letter read, in part:

“I was walking at the beach called Pavones-

Golfito. At 5 p.m., I saw a green bottle that contained something inside. Rapidly, I broke it and I was very surprised to discover the letters. . . . I want to know about you to be able to write you always. . . . To be able to know you is my desire.”

The students who wrote the letters--Daniel Huh, Janice Lee, Caroline Cowie, Jennifer Smith, David Sun, Sophie Gee, Karen Fujimoto, Jason Kim, Stephen Sohn and Jason Salter--are high school students now.

“I want to send this guy a picture of the kids when they were in third grade,” Woodworth said

The children wrote the letters as part of a class assignment. Half were placed in one bottle; the rest in another. In 1990, one bottle reached the Northern Marianas island of Saipan where Theodore Gebhart found it.

Woodworth’s current third-grade class now is anxious to send bottle-mail of its own, she said.

--COMPILED BY MIMI KO CRUZ AND JENNIFER LEUER