Lintlafatso li monate!

I think Peace Corps Volunteers can sometimes get overwhelmed when they realize the full scope of what “sustainable development” means. Personally, I see those two words and think: why not throw “delicious” in there too?

The Standard 7 students at Matholeng come to school on Saturday mornings, because at the end of the year they must take the Primary School Leaving Exam (PSLE), the national exam that has some bearing on their options for high school. I love that my school does this, because I know from talking with other volunteers that some schools have trouble fielding a full team of teachers even on weekdays. It’s unquestionably good that my school understands how important a solid primary education foundation is to building good lives for these kids. But it also makes me a little sad that they’re in there on Saturdays when they should have the opportunity to run around the village and wreak some low-key havoc, having fun doing whatever it is 12 year-olds do for leisure. So the other day I came to hang out with them and brought them some banana bread to eat when they finished their lesson. I have never been a good cook, but I have enjoyed picking a few things out of the volunteer cookbook to try, and am currently working towards my ten thousand hours on cooking banana bread.

They loved the banana bread (I know this because it has shown up in almost all of their compositions, in sentences like “And then we went and ate some banana bread” which appear under every topic from “Moshoeshoe’s Day” to “A Trip I Took” to “The Day I Was Nearly Bitten By a Snake”). So I asked if they wanted to learn how to cook it together next week, and they cheered.

Q: But did you use locally available materials? Otherwise it’s not sustainable and you are an embarrassing failure.

A: Of course I used locally available materials. Grow up.

‘M’e Faso, who is, as you know, the teacher of Standard 7 and the principal of Matholeng, helped me to assign students to bring various ingredients, and throughout the week the students came up to me to ask if banana bread was still happening next Saturday.

That Saturday, some of the Standard 7s came to my rondavel to help me carry up some of the equipment from my house. I went up there, and wrote the recipe on the board. I told them that this was just if they wanted to copy it down and use it later, but their reflexes kicked in and everyone copied it into their notebooks. They constantly impress me with their English, and I was proud to see how readily they applied it to reading and following the instructions. It was a great day, and a few of them even told me that they would try to cook it at their homes.