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World Food Day was last week. The idea of sending my kids to school without a good, healthy breakfast inside them fills me with a mild terror. How would they concentrate? How would they learn? Would they make it through to recess time without breaking down? These are privileged kids who rarely go a couple of hours without something to snack on or declaring they’re ‘starving’.
Yet each day literally millions of children across the globe turn up for school on an empty stomach. Or they don’t turn up at all.
Provision of a daily school meal is a proven, strong incentive for families to consistently send their children to school. Not only do the kids get access to at least one good meal a day, it means they are at school and learning. It’s an important tool in increasing the education of a whole generation and helping break the cycle of hunger and poverty.
Our monthly donation went to Oxfam – one of The Life You Can Save’s recommendations of highly effective charities. One of the many great ways that Oxfam uses donations is to support school meals to encourage students to attend and stay in school.
Our month’s donation was enough to provide school meals every school day for 23 children for a whole year.
Making school lunches for our own kids is a relentless chore. It’s like Groundhog Day. Here we are another morning, here we are at the kitchen bench making up the school lunch boxes. Again. Weren’t we just here yesterday?
Yet now, for the next year, as we make school lunches for our own kids – a roll, a piece of fruit, a sweet treat – we can mull over the facts that we’re lucky to have the means to do so, and that somewhere today, 23 kids will have their own school lunch courtesy of donations like ours.
It’s definitely food for thought.
