Valentine Day | Amazing Valentine Day

Message in a Bottle: On Valentine's Day, a Different Sort of Love Story

Once upon a time, a devoted husband was fishing off a Brooklyn pier when he found a bottle bobbing in the water with a four-page letter and a silver ring inside.

Intrigued but unable to read the foreign words, Richard Velez showed it to his wife, Maritza, on that late summer day in 2000.

Even before she knew what the letter said, Maritza thought of her favorite movie, "Message in a Bottle," a 1999 film about a widower who tosses a letter about lost love in the sea.
"I knew it was very romantic," she said.

And so began Richard and Maritza Velez's quest for what lovers and lovers of love stories the world over long for — a fairy tale ending.

Richard and Maritza Velez pose with the message in a bottle in their Staten Island, New York, home on Feb. 6. Pearl Gabel / Pearl Gabel for NBC

After contemplating their find for a while, Richard and Martiza brought the bottle and its contents it to a newspaper reporter who determined the writing was Polish and had it translated.

It was written by a lovesick Pole named Leszek (pronounced LESH-ek) — no last name provided — to his girlfriend, Iza (EE-zah), who was apparently visiting faraway America. And it was romantic indeed.

"I miss you like a man in a desert misses water," it read. "My heart remembers, refuses to forget. It loves and worships you. And waits for word from you."

Maritza Velez scans the love letter. Pearl Gabel / Pearl Gabel for NBC

Leszek instructed Iza to stick the letter and a ring, which he presumably had given to her, in a bottle and hurl it into the sea "as a gesture of love."

But it also contained a passage that immediately raised alarms when his story was published in the New York Daily News a decade and a half ago.

"I don't know what I will do with myself the six weeks you are away," Leszek wrote. "During this period, there may come a time when I won't be able to take it anymore and I may do something to myself."

After Polish newspapers picked up the story, the country's president at the time, Aleksander Kwasniewski, personally ordered that Leszek and Iza be found.

Without a last name, it took two weeks for authorities to track down the lovers down in a small city called Bydgoszcz (BID-goshtch).

But Neither wanted to be found. And they dispatched an emissary to tell the world they were all right.
"He's 20 and she's 18," Grazyna Ostropolska, a reporter for their hometown newspaper, said after interviewing the couple at the time. "They never dreamed that the letter would end up in The Daily News or that it would get the attention of the Polish president."

While Richard and Maritza were relieved that Leszek and Iza were safe, it was not the happy ending they had imagined.

"We were hoping they would come to New York and we would be able to give them the bottle and it would, you know, be a real happy ending," Maritza said. "But for whatever reason, it didn't happen."
Richard, a New York City fire department EMT, has been using what little he knows about the couple — their first names, approximate ages, and hometown — to search for them online.

"I've tried doing multiple searches, but I was never successful," he said.

Recently he stumbled onto the wedding pictures of a couple named Leszek and Iza who live in Scotland, but it was not them.

The silver men's ring found in the bottle sits atop the message. Pearl Gabel / Pearl Gabel for NBC

"We were disappointed," Maritza said. "They looked like they were in love."

Richard and Maritza know a thing or two about love. They were 14 when they met in 1980 while living across the street from each other in Brooklyn. Now 50, they have three children — a son who is an NYPD police officer, a daughter who works as a respiratory therapist in Pennsylvania and a 7-year-old girl they have raised since she was 4-days-old and whom they recently adopted.

They even have his and hers vintage muscle cars — a 1971 Olds Cutlass convertible for Maritza and a 1971 Chevy Chevelle for Richard.

And they still have the bottle containing Leszek's letter and ring resting in a drawer beside Maritza's night table in their Staten Island home.

"Every year around Labor Day we talk about them," Maritza said. "That's around the time when my husband found the bottle. But we think about them a lot, wonder what they are like. Whether they're happy, like us."

Richard found the bottle in September 2000. But there was little talk of Leszek and Iza the next September, when the 9/11 terrorist attacks banished idle thoughts.

Richard was driving Maritza to her job in lower Manhattan when the first of the hijacked planes hit the Twin Towers.

"He secured us at home and then he left to work on Ground Zero," Maritza said.

The experience left Richard with damaged lungs and asthma.

But in the Septembers that followed, their thoughts regularly returned to Leszek and Iza. And now, with the arrival of another Valentine's Day, they once more find themselves wondering about the couple they've never met but who have become part of their lives.

"I picture them in a garden, walking around a fountain, with cobblestones," Maritza said. "Him I picture tall, thin. Her, I picture somewhat shy, for some reason. But just by looking at them you can tell they're very much in love."

Even though it may never happen, Richard said he's got their Valentine's Day double-date all planned out — a carriage ride through Central Park, dinner at The View, maybe a Broadway show.
"We'd do a little talking, do a little dancing," he said. "It would be very nice." 

Your Valentine's Day roses might just be from Kenya

NYAHURURU, Kenya -- This Valentine's Day, there's a good chance your flowers came from Kenya.

"I know the flowers are for giving on Valentine's Day," said Phanice Cherop, a worker at a flower farm in Kenya. "They are very beautiful."

On a crisp February morning, Cherop squeezed through a row of shoulder-high white roses, cut a flower and methodically placed it in the bunch she carried. The Kenyan-grown flower was likely headed for a vase in Australia, England, Japan or the United States.

Kenya's cool climate and high altitude make it perfect for growing large, long-lasting roses. Such conditions have helped make Kenya become the world's fourth-biggest supplier after the Netherlands, Ecuador and Colombia.

Cherop, a 29-year-old single mother of two, works at AAA Growers' Simba farm in Nyahururu, four hours' drive north of the capital, Nairobi. It's the one of company's four 20-hectare (50-acre) farms that make them Kenya's third-largest grower of vegetables and flowers combined. Cherop was one of 600 workers bused in from surrounding villages to pick or pack thousands of roses to be sent around the world ahead of Feb. 14.

Flowers are intricately tied to the global economy. When it collapsed in 2008, the cut-flower trade lost $1.5 billion the following year. In 2013, global exports of cut flowers, cut foliage, living plants and flower bulbs amounted to $20.6 billion, more than twice the amount in 2001.

International events, including Russia's war in Ukraine and plummeting oil prices, have shaped flower fortunes for numerous Kenyan farms. Sales to oil-producing nations, such as Norway and those in the Middle East, have dropped due to their reduced spending power, said Britain-born Andrew Mules, general manager of AAA Growers' Simba farm.

"Up until two years ago, flowers would have been the most profitable part of the farm," he said. "Now it is our third after soft fruit and then vegetable crops."

Kenya is the sixth-largest flower exporter to the U.S., according to the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. As east Africa's agricultural powerhouse, Kenya supplies the European Union with 38 per cent of its cut-flower imports, partly due to a tax-exemption trade agreement.

Mr. Mules, who farmed in Zimbabwe before being evicted under President Robert Mugabe's land reforms, said prolonged rains due to the El Nino weather pattern have pressured the company's bottom line.

"The timing of Valentine's Day is perfect for Kenya because it falls in the dry season," he said. "Unfortunately, this year, due to el Nino, it has lengthened the so called 'short rains.' Instead of stopping in November we were getting rain in January."

Another lament is about Russia.

In 2012, flower exports to Russia, the world's fifth-largest flower importer, began shrinking due to its tanking economy and depreciating ruble. Russian military intervention in Ukraine in 2014 only "worsened the situation," said Cindy van Rijswick, a fruit, vegetables and floriculture analyst at Dutch bank Rabobank.

"A more indirect effect is that, because of the declining cut-flowers exports to Russia, these flowers are supplied to other markets, which causes pressure on prices," she said.

Dana Malaskova, AAA Growers' commercial manager, said that up until September 2014, the company was sending a quarter of their flowers to Russia, with a steady 5 per cent annual growth; now the volume has shrunk to 5 per cent of the total.

"We no longer rely on Russia for International Women's day on March 8, the year's second-biggest flower-giving event," she said.

The drop in Russian demand isn't translating into a drop of the price of a bouquet this Valentine's Day, said Neville Ratemo, a director at Kenya's Horticultural Council.
"There is always a big volume at this time of year and people will always be buying roses, so the price goes up," he said.

The Kenya Flower Council said exports rose from 86,480 tons in 2006 to 136,601 tons in 2014. Kenya's flower business continues to employ half a million Kenyans and earned more than half a billion dollars last year, according to government statistics.

In the temperature-controlled storeroom of AAA Growers' warehouse, stacks of cardboard boxes bound for Canada, Australia, the United States and France are the end point to the process that started with workers like Cherop.

Cherop, who earns Kenya's rural minimum wage of $80 a month, said the arduous manual work is a necessity to feed her family. Giggling, she admits, after a bit of prodding, that she's never received flowers.

"We do not really do this here in Kenya," she said. "No man has ever given me. I would like some."