Eat your Breakfast
School Bun Project‘Eat your breakfast' was a constant and sometimes irritating refrain throughout my childhood. Yet suddenly I find myself promoting the importance of a project I started which simply tries to ensure poor children in southern Sri Lanka have something to eat prior to school starting. Breakfast of any kind, I have realised, is such a privilege.
Following the Tsunami, the huge surge of funds and interest that descended on places like Sri Lanka was amazing. But, three years on, the possibilities regarding long term help and aid, in areas such as Southern Sri Lanka, still remain challenging and problematic. Sustainability, microfinance, etc., are all concepts bandied around, but when children are fainting from hunger less than a kilometer from where you live, it forces you to go down to the wire on where your own moral compass lies. Can you really endorse sustainability and all the arguments for ‘giving a rod and not a fish’ when it is taking years for the rod to materialize?
When someone is drowning you don’t say, ‘Hold on, some day I will teach you to swim.’ Very basic urgent help is what is needed now in so many parts of rural Sri Lanka, and we are not talking here of millions of pounds or huge networks of staff. No, the cost is £15 a year per child and it can be run by a very tight ship.
Indeed, it is perhaps one area where individuals and smaller NGOs are perfectly positioned to help and complement the bigger aid picture.
Over the last three years, watching aid dispensed in various forms down in the Matara area on the southern coast, I have grown to feel longer term strategies are for the bigger aid agencies. They have the resources, experience and contacts, but the children in our area and in the rural schools throughout the country, need and continue to need, urgent help now if they are to ever fulfill their potential.
My family and I lived for four years in Sri Lanka prior to the Tsunami. When the waves struck, I like so many others, started raising money to rebuild the village where we lived. Miraculously, we raised more than we needed to build the 80 houses that were totally or partially destroyed in the village. When the temple that had acted as a temporary shelter had been repaired, and a local school for the deaf had been totally rebuilt, we still had funds left.
I knew there were pressing poverty issues in the rural schools nearby, but I had not really fully recognized the extent and severity of it. Simply put, in many of the local schools the children were desperately hungry.
‘Sri Lanka is so lush, isn’t it simply a matter of picking the coconuts from the trees?’ people have so often asked me. But, you cannot pick coconuts from the trees if you do not own the land.
Indeed, it was almost ironic that as money poured in for the coastal schools damaged by the Tsunami, many of the children in the inland rural areas a few kilometers away were fainting from hunger at assembly. As one teacher told me, ‘It happens so many times - some children from the poorer families arrive on a Monday not having eaten since the previous Friday.’
Two years prior to the Tsunami I had visited a very poor school less than a kilometer from my home and had, in that very gauche way, given books. Then one day one of the teachers, looking very embarrassed, sidled up to me and said ‘Madam, we do not need books, we need food.’
With 75 children in this particular school, I then tried to think of an item that would be easy to distribute daily and not require any kind of dish or utensil. It was then suggested all children love 'fish buns' (a type of large pastie with a fish based filling) and very popular in Sri Lanka.
I inspected some local bakeries and set up a very basic system whereby the buns were delivered, on a daily basis, to the schools prior to the first lesson.
From the week the buns were introduced, school attendance jumped more than 20%. Soon, I was approached by other schools, but had been limited by financial constraints, to only supplying two schools with a total of 300 children ie 1500 buns per week.
However, due to the remaining Tsunami funds, expanding the breakfast bun programme was possible.
With the help of volunteers, I conducted a survey of many of the schools within a 20 kilometer radius. Immediately, we began adding further schools into the ‘breakfast bun project’.
There are now 26 schools and nearly 5,000 children receiving a bun every morning. The project is simple and easy to operate - just using an extremely basic, one page, monthly sheet reporting system.
A joy of this project is, it is also so transparent. There is little room for monies going astray. The school registers mean the number of children can be established. A fixed number of buns are delivered daily to each school and there is a fixed price per bun. If, the local bakers try to supply an inferior quality bun the mothers are soon to be found complaining at their doors. Similarly, if the children don’t receive their buns the mothers berate the headmasters. Everyone involved has an interest in monitoring the programme and there is little need for extensive administration or more than occasional unannounced spot checks.
‘Some 13 year old children have started to come to school for the first time’
‘The children are now far more alert and attendance is far higher’.
We all understand the need for breakfast, particularly for children. We know ourselves how grumpy and ineffective we become if we skip a meal. Many
of these children only get one meal a day and it is normally very spartan as, sadly, the rural community in Sri Lanka is becoming noticeably poorer as inflation is spiraling due to the ongoing war in the north.
I am now looking to expand this project further, and to include another 5,000 children.
The approximate cost of achieving this is £85,000 per annum.
Is there a private donor who remembers pre-breakfast rumbling stomach pains?
Or, possibly a large corporate donor who wishes to be able to say 'We actually feed 5,000 kids a day breakfast"?
nmartin@sltnet.lk
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