After a short visit to the Mary’s Meals Malawi HQ and a meet and greet with the ground staff, we visited a local girls school just outside Limbe, in Blantyre. Meeting with the principal gave us a better understanding of how essential Mary’s Meals is.
“It’s Monday, so we have full attendance today. Some of the girls will not have eaten since their bowl on Friday,” the Principal explained. Coming to school now has an added incentive!
The school itself is semi residential with half the girls coming from surrounding areas, just behind the hostels is the feeding centre. A small shelter with a few charcoal stoves, that’s so full of smoke it’s hard to stand over the boiling cookers for too long.
The volunteers serving up the Likuni Phala are wonderful, giving up a day’s work to make sure the girls get a proper meal. One lady is particularly amazing and still attends even through her granddaughter has long since left the school.
We had a go at stirring the pots of porridge – giving the cooking a go really makes you appreciate how hard it is to stand over the stove for hours on end and serve the kids.
At twelve a stampede of kids flow from their classrooms, eager to get their porridge. The average class size here is 200. It’s truly amazing to see Mary’s Meals in action and to hear first hand from the teachers and girls how a daily meal has changed school life.
