Woman’s collection of postcards from writers around the world on display at Freeport Area Library

Kim Aluise always liked paper and old letters. She writes to strangers around the world via postcards, and they write her back.

Aluise, 49, of Harrison has amassed 350 postcards from people who live in 45 countries and counting.

About 40 of those cards are on display until Aug. 14 in a front window at the Freeport Area Library.

Aluise is waiting for a responding postcard from someone she wrote to in Timbuktu.

Yes, Timbuktu is a real place, a region of Mali, Aluise said. Mail is transported via camel, and it takes roughly three months for a letter to reach and return from there, she noted.

Aluise is one of more than 800,000 members of postcrossing.com, a website that, for free, allows members to send postcards through the mail and receive them back from random people in 207 countries.

“I had no idea that there was an organization of this kind,” said Nancy Hagins, head librarian at the Freeport Area Library.

Since Aluise is a volunteer at the library, Hagins would hear the stories about Aluise’s latest postcard and thought the public would like to learn about Aluise’s hobby and the international postcard-writing community.

“It’s amazing,” Hagins said, “that Kim gets to view our country and people from another person’s perspective from another country.”

Aluise has been a member of postcrossing.com for about a year and a half. She loves the images of foreign postcards and narratives sent by foreigners.

“It makes the mail a lot more interesting,” she said.

Although the exchanges between postcard writers are “one and done,” Aluise said, they are fun and informative. Members provide their interests and details so a stranger can strike up a conversation in a postcard.

Aluise continues to learn about details of living abroad she never knew before: Andorra is a tiny, landlocked country between France and Spain. In Denmark, only four out of 10 Danes own a car but nine out of 10 residents own a bicycle.

And what do foreigners learn about Aluise, America and Pittsburgh?

Pittsburghese, she said. “Did you eat yet or ‘jeet-jet?’ ”

“It’s a great hobby for all ages,” said Aluise, who continues to wait for a postcard from Timbuktu while she pens new postcards for more international destinations.