For four years, 14-year-old Patrick Kaufmann has been writing love letters to those who don’t receive them. Living near Washington, in the United States, he wrote his first cards for Valentine’s Day 2020, during a charity operation to prepare food parcels for sick children. He suggested adding a thoughtful letter to each package, filled with little hearts and words of love. He wrote thirty, and then it became an obsession: “I kept telling myselfhe tells the washington post, How awesome would it be if I could figure out a way to send some to everyone who would love to receive some, but no one writes to.“
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For Valentine’s Day 2021, he called on other little hands, in this case his classmates, immediately enthusiastic about the challenge, with whom he wrote 300 cards, addressed this time to adults hospitalized for cancer cases. In 2022, last year, rebelote, but this time with other students, educated in other schools in his city. Same enthusiasm, same efficiency: 3,000 letters written. And today, for this February 14, 2023, Pat received the help of thousands of students in 62 schools across the country, for a total of 16,000 cards, all written and personalized by hand.
A house that looks like a post office
He is the one who manages everything, all alone. He created a website to recruit volunteer writers, he contacted retirement homes, hospitals and associations helping sick children to deliver all these cards to their recipients. Finally, it is at his home, or rather at his parents’, that the missives were stored before being sent.
His admiring father, Roy, confides that he is still a little overwhelmed by the situation and that with 16,000 letters waiting to be sent, their house literally resembles a post office distribution centre. “Of course, it takes up space, recognizes the schoolboybut I’m thinking of the people who will open these letters and who will be made to smile, those who no longer have a family, who are alone, or who are sick..”
These forgotten Valentine’s Day, the feast of lovers, which a 14-year-old schoolboy therefore proposes to transform into a celebration of attention to others, and tenderness for all.