Aug. 11, 2026, 9:08 p.m. ET
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Johannesburg
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.
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.)
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.
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?
People say that I am tall like a tower. I have huge eyes.
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.”