The student series

Tales from our high school program

Sustainable Coffee Bay’s High School Scholarship Programme was the brain child of Coffee Shack Backpackers, which was one of our first projects, starting from 2004 since then we have helped 46 children get quality education, 80% of our alumnis are either working or studying further. In 2011, Sustainable Coffee Bay was registered as the non-profit organisation that took over Coffee Shack’s Community Projects. To this day, we maintain a close relationship with our original founders and discovered these wonderful stories in our archives, so please enjoy our short quarterly student tales.

This quarter we are bringing you a story of Thandile.

“It was not always easy by I knew what I wanted and that’s what kept me going”   Said Thandile when he came to the office to show us his matric (final year) results earlier this year. He qualified for admission to bachelors and got 2 distinctions.

Thandile is an 18 year old young man from a family of five raised by a single mother, none of his siblings are working or have made it to matric. They all live on their mothers government grant. He started on our program in 2017, he was the only boy amongst 2 girls in the program for that year and his hard work and perseverance got him to where he is today.

Like most of our students, Thandile struggled with his subjects on his first year probably because of all the changes he had to go through (leaving his family behind and starting a new life in a big city all by himself). We found a tutor for him, he started to attend extra classes, ever since then he started to do well and gained confidence. He improved quiet a lot in his studies on his second and third year of high school.

Thandile has been accepted to study BSc Health Education and Promotion, first at his immediate family to go to University and one of the few in his area. We are so proud to have been part of his journey. We wish him all the best!