Learning about a country through a pen pal

A pen pal in another country can teach you things no guidebook, documentary or travel blog ever will: what a weekday morning sounds like there, what people complain about, what they find funny, which foods are eaten on which days and why. But they can only teach you if you ask well — and if you remember that you are writing to a person, not to a tourist office. This guide is about learning about a country through a pen pal without stereotyping them, interrogating them or getting it wrong.

Start by noticing what you already think

Before you ask your pen pal a single question about their country, it is worth spending two minutes on what you already believe about it. Most of us carry a picture of other countries assembled from films, football, holiday adverts, news headlines and one history lesson at school. That picture is usually out of date, often based on one city or one moment, and sometimes simply wrong.

You do not need to get rid of it, and you could not if you tried. You just need to know it is there, so you can notice when it slips into a question. "Do you ride camels to school?" is the cartoon version, and few people would write that. But "Is it always hot there?", "Do you all eat sushi every day?" or "Is it dangerous where you live?" come from the same place, and pen pals hear them far more often than you might think. They are rarely offended. They are often a little tired.

A useful habit is to turn an assumption into a genuine question. Instead of "I suppose it is always sunny in Brazil", try "What is the weather like where you are at this time of year?" The second version cannot be wrong, and the answer — perhaps that it is cold and raining in the south — is far more interesting than having your assumption politely corrected.

One person is not a country

This is the single most important thing to keep in mind. Your pen pal is one person, from one family, in one town, with one set of opinions. They are not a representative sample. Someone from Lagos and someone from a village in the north of Nigeria may have about as much in common as someone from London and someone from a farm in the Highlands — and often less.

So be careful with questions that ask them to speak for millions of people. "What do Germans think about…?" is a question no German can honestly answer. "What do you think about…?" or "What do people around you say about…?" are questions they can. In the same way, be careful with what you take away. If your pen pal in Mexico tells you they never eat spicy food, you have learned something true about your pen pal, not about Mexico.

Many countries also contain several languages, religions, regions and ways of life that differ sharply from each other, and your pen pal may belong to a minority within their own country. Asking "Where are you from, within the country?" and "Is your area typical, or quite different from the rest?" often opens up a far richer answer than any question about the country as a whole.

Ask about ordinary life

The questions that teach you the most are usually the smallest ones. Big questions about history, politics and national character tend to get careful, general answers. Small questions about everyday life get specific, personal and often surprising ones. Some that work well:

• What did you have for breakfast today, and is that what most people around you eat?
• What does your journey to school or work look like? How long does it take, and what do you see?
• What is in a normal supermarket where you live that you think would not be in mine?
• What do people do on a Sunday afternoon in your town?
• What is something everyone your age complains about?
• What is the most popular song in your country at the moment, and do you like it?
• What is a phrase in your language that does not translate well?

Notice that none of these ask your pen pal to explain their country. They ask your pen pal to describe their own life. A country comes into focus through hundreds of these small details, and after a year of letters you will understand more about how people really live there than many visitors do.

Curiosity, not interrogation

There is a point at which curiosity becomes a quiz. If every letter you send is mostly questions about your pen pal's country — the food, the schools, the holidays, the government, the weather, the language — it starts to feel less like a friendship and more like a research project with them as the subject. Most people enjoy talking about home. Nobody enjoys being treated as a free source of information.

Two habits keep things balanced. First, ask no more than two or three questions per letter, and let them come out of the conversation rather than a list. Second, for every question you ask about their country, offer something about your own. If you ask what a school lunch looks like where they are, describe yours, honestly, including the grey bits. That turns a question into an exchange, and it gives them something to react to as well as something to answer. There is more on the craft of this in how to ask better questions.

And let them lead now and then. Some pen pals love explaining their country; others mainly want to talk about books, music or their cat, and find their nationality the least interesting thing about them. Pay attention to which subjects they warm to and which ones they answer in a single line.

Check yourself against neutral sources

Your pen pal is a wonderful source for what life feels like. They are not always a reliable source for facts, and they would not claim to be. Everyone has gaps, everyone remembers some history the way they were taught it at school, and everyone has opinions that sound like facts when written down confidently.

So when something they tell you is surprising, or when you are about to repeat it to someone else, look it up. An encyclopaedia, an official statistics office, a public broadcaster, or a reputable atlas are good places to check population figures, dates, how a government works or which languages are spoken where. If what you read differs from what your pen pal said, that is not a reason to correct them in your next letter. It is often a reason to ask: "I read that most people in your country speak two languages — is that true where you live?" The gap between the official picture and a real person's life is frequently the most interesting thing you will learn.

Checking also works in the other direction. Before you write something confident about their country — its history, its food, its politics — it is worth a quick check that you have it right. A pen pal will forgive almost anything, but it is nicer to be the one who knew that the capital is not the largest city.

Share your own country honestly

Learning about a country through a pen pal only works if it goes both ways, and your pen pal is curious about where you live too. The temptation is to give them the postcard version: the castle, the famous dish, the national holiday. That is fine as a starting point, but the honest version is far better reading.

Tell them what your town is actually like, including the dull bits. Tell them what people where you live really eat on a weeknight, not just on festival days. Tell them what you love about your country and, if you know them well enough, what frustrates you. Say when you are not typical: "Most people here drive everywhere, but I have never learned." It helps them avoid building the same kind of stereotype about you that you are trying not to build about them.

Be careful, too, not to speak for your whole country any more than you would want them to speak for theirs. "Here, people tend to…" is fine. "We all…" almost never is.

Seeing more than one answer

Because one pen pal can only ever give you one view, it helps to see the wider spread. PenPalConnect's country hubs are where members who live in a country answer other people's questions about it and share recipes and local tips, and the monthly World Question asks the whole community one ordinary question — about meals, mornings, school or home — and shows the answers country by country. They are useful for exactly the reason that a single pen pal is not: you hear from many people instead of one, and you can see at a glance how differently the same everyday question is answered from one country to the next.

They also make good letter material. "I saw that a lot of people in your country said they eat dinner after eight — is that true in your house?" is a question that starts with something real and invites your pen pal to tell you where they fit, or do not.

An example

Say you have been writing to Ayşe in Turkey for a few months. A letter that asks about her country well might include a paragraph like this:

I have been wondering about breakfast since your last letter, when you said yours "went on for about two hours" on Sunday. Here a weekend breakfast is mostly toast eaten standing up, so I am now very jealous. Is that a family thing, or does everyone in Izmir do it? And what is on the table? I tried to look it up but I suspect the internet version is the hotel version, not the one in your kitchen.

In return, here is the honest truth about a Dutch Sunday: it rains, my father reads the paper, and at some point someone suggests a walk that nobody wants to go on.

It picks up something she said, admits what the writer does not know, asks about her family rather than "Turkish people", and offers something of their own in exchange. That is the whole method in two paragraphs. For more on handling differences of manners, humour and calendars, see the guide to writing across time zones and cultures.