On a bright Saturday morning in February, I stood in front of a classroom in Johannesburg and announced triumphantly to the 30 kids seated in front of me: “We’re getting pen pals!”
Rows of blank faces stared back at me. I waited. They waited. Finally, one girl raised her hand. “Ma’am,” she began tentatively, “what is a pen pal?”
I was born in the United States at the end of the 1980s – a time these kids earnestly refer to as “the 1900s.” That makes me part of the last generation to know the world before the internet. I am not sure who first introduced me to pen pals, but in my childhood, I had a handful. I don’t remember anything about them, only the thrill of receiving an envelope in some unknown handwriting with a return address from an exotic, faraway place scrawled in the upper left corner: Tulsa, Minneapolis, Saratoga.
Why We Wrote This
Our Africa editor began a letter exchange for local students. She ended up with an archive of childhood.
I wanted to share that thrill with these South African students, who are part of a weekend literacy program I coordinate in a low-income neighborhood called Alexandra. So I found teachers in Mexico and the United States whose students were keen to exchange letters with them.
Once the South African kids understood what this was all about, they were keen, too. (I am replacing their names with first initials to protect the privacy of minors.)
Dear Pen Pal,
Hi, my name is K. and I live in South Africa. I am 12 years old but turning 13. … I love soccer! I’m actually really good at it, so it’s basically my talent! One thing I really don’t like is bubble gum. I don’t like when people chew it aggressively.
Dear Pen Pal,
In my country we do many things like build robots, prank each other, and all other things. … I don’t like cheese and my favorite food is salad. Make up, I don’t like it, sorry. And do you like running?
Dear Pen Pal,
People say that I am tall like a tower. I have huge eyes.
Dear Pen Pal,
A fun fact about me is that I am fun but at the very same time I am rude.
The students who wrote these letters are a dazzlingly multilingual crowd, natural storytellers who can toggle between three or four languages in the same conversation. But many have barely been taught to read. A quarter of those who speak Sepedi – one of the dominant languages in Alexandra – reach third grade unable to read a single word in any language. Eighty-one percent of South African fourth graders cannot understand the content of a simple text in English, according to a Progress in International Reading Literacy study .
The problem, needless to say, is not intelligence but lack of resources. Students who learn in overcrowded classrooms, with parents who can’t help them with homework, quickly fall behind. Reading and writing can become a joyless slog.
Writing to someone on the other side of the world, though – that’s interesting enough to bypass the boredom. Many of the students threw themselves into drafting and redrafting their letters until they were clear and readable. The end product wasn’t always grammatically perfect, but for me, that was part of what made the letters so powerful. Here were kids on opposite sides of the world, pushing through the vulnerable act of writing in their second, third, or fourth language in order to forge a connection with each other.
“My favourite food is pizza,” explained a 13-year-old in her opening letter. “Every time when we go to the mall with my mother, she always know that we don’t come back without a pizza.”
As we went, I explained that letters were a kind of written conversation. To keep it going, you had to ask questions. Luckily, the kids had many.
Do you eat meatballs?
What kind of phone are you using?
How do you say pink in your language?
Can you do a backflip?
Does your place have an ocean?
Are you magical and a dreamer?
On the other side of the world, their correspondents fired back with queries of their own:
Do you like to sleep?
Where do you buy make-up in South Africa?
How many kids are in your English class?
Do you believe that there is life after you die?
Does your name mean something?
If you could change something about your house, what would it be?
In my pen pal-ing times, you dropped your letter in a mailbox. But South Africa’s postal service has a well-earned reputation for losing mail, so I opted for a 21st-century hybrid approach. The children handwrote their letters. Their teachers and I swapped photos of them, then printed them for the kids to read, misspellings and all.
“I like so much mountain bicicle,” explained a letter writer in Mexico. “One time I went to the mountain with friends and one friend falled in a very deep hole … and it was very difficult to get him out of there.”
The letters from Mexico arrived on graph paper, in a tight cursive that the South African students had never seen before. Much of the content was foreign, too. “What is ziplining?” someone asked me. “What is avocado toast?”
Meanwhile, some South African children wrote that their favorite foods were pap and mogodu, not realizing that their pen pal’s mother wasn’t cooking the same dishes for dinner: stiff cornmeal porridge and tripe stew for dinner.
But soon, the writers began to conjure their worlds for each other.
“Alexandra is a very noisy place, overcrowded but really fun and exciting, because you get to know a lot of people,” one eighth grader in my class explained. “We really like to make our own words here, like when we want to say South Africa, we say ‘South Ahhh.’”
“I love going to the women’s march,” one student wrote. “On the 8th of march it is international day of women. Here in mexico it is not so much a celebration, it is more of a fight for women to live without violence and have the same rights as men.”
“My home is near an airport, so it gets noisy here sometimes,” explained a high school senior in the United States. “I’ve lived here most of my life, though, so I’m used to the sounds of the airplanes. Does [Alexandra] get noisy too?”
And there were many pieces of childhood that transcended culture.
Kids in all three countries loved learning dances from TikTok and annoying their siblings. “You’re right – KFC is delicious! affirmed one Mexican boy to his new South African friend.”
In their letters, the children from each place wrote that they aspired to become doctors, lawyers, and pilots. “I want to be a YouTuber and change the world,” wrote a boy in Mexico.
Most of the exchanges fizzled quickly. Despite letters being exchanged virtually, the pace was glacial. There was spring break in one hemisphere, then winter break on the other. There were finals, field trips, cross-country meets.
“Hello, hope you’re well,” wrote a 10-year-old girl in South Africa. “I’m fine but terrified at the same time. We are about to write our June exams and I haven’t started studying.”
Students at the private school in Mexico wrote about ski holidays in France. Students in South Africa talked about going home to the village to see their grandmothers. Questions hung in the air, unanswered.
“I want to see how Mexico looks like and learn the languages you speak in your place,” wrote an eighth grader in my group in her final letter. “I want us to be best pen pals and see each other when we grow up. Do you have brown hair?”
On both sides of the Atlantic, life moved on. And I was left with an international archive of childhood, in all its particularities and all its universality. There was, I could see clearly, so much more uniting the world’s children than dividing them. ■