Tuesday, March 18, 2008

A New Roof and Lunch Guaranteed

With a generous donation from my parents, the school has been able to replace the damaged roof with new tarpaulins. We haven't had another big storm to test it yet, so we are just hoping it holds. It certainly looks very nice, brand new white tarpaulins under the bright sun.

More very generous donations from the Rudolf Steiner School in New York City, the family of a former student at Steiner, and the parents of one of my Steiner colleagues have ensured that the lunch program can run through the middle of July, when school is scheduled to close for the year. It is a significant amount of money required to feed two hundred plus people here everyday (I am including the faculty, the cooks, their families and the various neighbor children who regularly stop by to eat from the pots) and I am grateful to all of the donors for making it possible to make this program something the school community can count on. With food prices rising everyday in the markets, these lunches are often the only meals our students and even our cooks eat all day, although I have raised the cooks' salaries to avoid a repeat of when one of the cooks, the woman whose house we use for storage and cooking, asked me on a Saturday morning a few weeks ago for a few thousand leones because she had no money to buy food for her family.

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