When we were 16, we couldn’t even dream of going to America on a trip or American children coming to the USSR to visit us.
When we were 16, the Americans were often portrayed as unfriendly in Soviet movies and TV shows and newspaper articles.
When we were 16, very few people could go abroad and learn of it first-hand, and there were no student and educator exchanges and no global educational telecomputing networks.
When we were 16, the world didn’t go beyond the boundaries of our country for us. But it does for those who are 16 now.
Our young friends, both Americans and Soviets! You are lucky, because you have a brilliant chance to make our world a smaller place, communicating, working together, having fun together, learning a lot from each other and coming to love each other. We are different with our cultures, ways of life, governments and traditions. And we are very much the same, living on this small blue planet, the Earth. You have a great chance to feel all that earlier than we did, to get to know each other better than we did and to learn to live and cooperate with each other. We are happy, that despite all the difficulties and problems we are having in the Soviet Union just now, the Soviet-American computer camp is being opened for the fourth time. We hope it will be a success!
And we wish we were 16 now...
Irene & Kostya Ryazanov,
educators.
June, 1991.