Long lost pen pals meet in person 50 years later

TUCSON, Ariz. (KOLD News 13) - Two pen pals finally have met in person after 50 years of correspondence.

Donna Reed and Saroja Sevenan became pen pals in 1972. Reed was living in the United States and Sevenan was from India.

The two wrote consistently until 1976 and when they graduated from high school, they assumed their parents would let them meet. But when that didn’t happen they lost touch until now.

“I found someone on Facebook and I sent her a message,” Reed said when she found Sevenan on Facebook again in 2018.

On the other end of the world, Sevenan said she got the message saying that she was “vacationing with my family in Portugal. And that first day I opened my phone up in Lisbon and I see that Donna has messaged me. She wrote, ‘Are you the same Saroja I wrote to back in those days?’”

The answer was yes. Since then these two friends have been making up for lost time and figuring out just how much they remember from all those years ago.

“You know when you wrote to someone for a lot of years we remembered each other’s addresses. She remembered my zip code!” Reed said.

But this isn’t the end of this friendship. Now that Sevenan has made the trip to Tucson, Reed plans to do the same with a big trip to India to see her longtime friend.

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