Training Niger's next generation

Bon appetit!

Yesterday we started the hot lunch program at the Girls at Risk School here in Niger. This is something I have been dreaming about being able to do since last year even, so what a joy to be able to see it actually start! Currently we are only offering two hot meals a week until we are fully funded but the Girls are so excited to be a part of this! In a month or so we hope to add at least one more meal per week.

To help us with the set up, we got Paul’s two main apprentices to build us a shaded structure to cook under. They did a great job! Don’t they look proud!

Our three cooks learning the ropes and starting to cut and prep all the food for the first day.

Normally we will only have two per day and will arrange schedules as we are able to add more meals per week for the girls, but currently we are all in the training and learning stage. Me included!

This is our giant pot. It can cook rice for 100 people are a time (20kg of rice). We also have a smaller pot (12kg size) that we use for the stew type sauces. There was no gas burner we could find in the city to support our set up, so Paul designed one that works great! You can just barely see it’s square metal frame under this pot.

Hot peppers anyone? This is the amount of hot peppers they ground up and put in meals this week!

Miriama is one of our cooks two days a week (in addition to being a translator Wednesdays) and she is also going to be our stockroom manager and purchaser. It is so great to see her desire to learn new things and to work hard! She is not your average Tuareg woman!

The girls all line up by the water stations to wash their hands before lunch.

The cooks give each girl their portion of rice and cover it with a vegetable and nutrient rich sauce. We certainly had no complaints about the quality of our food!

We call the girls up in groups of ten to avoid chaos and they grab their own bowl and spoon. We decided to go with individual bowls rather than big communal platters to ensure that each girl would get their own portion and maximum nutrition rather than having to fight for quantity with others. It also allows them to eat slower and digest better!

Raichatou is really excited about her lunch!

A close up Kerrianne took of our first meal (we have 4 recipes in rotation set up so far). Check out all the thick veggies and meat!

The girls sit in groups on the mats and start to dig in. It was fun to see the morning class and afternoon class mixing and talking and really enjoying each other’s company. It is not a common occurrence in the year that they spend a lot of time together. There were so many happy faces.

After eating each girl takes her own bowl to the wash station to wash up.

We are still working on crowd control and traffic flow, but overall we were really happy with how well it went the first day!

In case you were wondering again why we started a hot lunch program- there are a few reasons. Famine is coming to Niger and the food crisis crunch is starting to hit many families. Crops failed last year so the food stocks in the country are decreasing and will not last until the next harvest. As stock goes down, prices naturally go up which puts a crunch on the already tight finances of the poor families who have their daughters at our school. To cope, many families are cooking less and making thinner and less nutritious items.

We are tracking the growth of the girls as well to not only identify need but to track progress and impact. We did all the heights and weights for our girls and entered them into the BMI chart from the World Health Organization. If you look at the chart below you will see very few of them are above normal. Most everyone is on the lower side of normal and we have 16 girls who are even in the malnourished category. One of our girls is so malnourished she is passing out at least once a week at school and going into shock. More about her story soon.  We believe that our love for these girls reaches beyond their education and their futures. We want to help their families through this crisis by feeding their daughters. We want to show them we love them. We want to go the extra mile to assure they can be at their best performance in the classroon without grinding hunger in their bellies.(Blue dots is the afternoon class and red dots is the morning class in case you were wondering)

I think the joy in Salamatou’s face says it all- Bon Appetit!