As a product of American higher education, I had never paid the slightest attention to the green banana, except to regard it as a fruit whose time had not yet come. Suddenly on that mountain road, its time and my need had converged. But as I reflected on it further, I realized that the green banana had been there all along. Its time reached back to the very origins of the banana. The people in that hamlet had known about it for years. My own time had come in relation to it. This chance encounter showed me the special genius of those people and the special potential of the green banana. I had been wondering for some time about those episodes of clarity which educators like to call "learning moments," and I knew I had just experienced two of them at once.