Adopt-a-School Project

Feed The Body To Reach The Brain

Providing nutritious lunches for students in Haiti.

In Dumay, Haiti, an impoverished community that lies across the river from the country’s capital city, Port Au Prince, a school was constructed for children who previously had not had much opportunity to be educated.

Due to hunger and poverty, attendance was not regular. Children had to stay home and look after their siblings or work in the fields. Often, they did not have the stamina to walk to school and sit in class all day.

The Founder and Director of the school had a vision for a feeding program to be built on site to help ensure the children had at least one healthy meal a day. If food was provided at the school, the children would come and they would be strong enough to sit and learn.

In 2007, that became a reality when Canadians provided funds and teams of people to assist in the construction and a school in Abbotsford, B.C. chose to help the school in Dumay.

Abbotsford Traditional Middle School adopted the Dumay School through a lunch program. They raised money by holding regular school-wide fundraising events throughout the year. They took pictures of students and wrote letters which were sent to Dumay School. Dumay School in turn took photos of their students holding the pictures of Abbotsford Traditional Students and wrote letters back.

It was all very exciting especially when the cafeteria opened and the children in Dumay were provided with a generous helping of rice and beans topped with a fish sauce. They could hardly believe it! Each day, 450 students in Dumay received a healthy lunch and, as expected, their attendace improved, their ability to sit and learn increased and they even had energy to play at break time.

Then, the Global Food Crisis hit, followed by the Global Fuel Crisis, followed by the Global Financial Crisis. The cost of the feeding program skyrocketed and it became increasingly more difficult for one middle school in Abbotsford to continue to bear all the costs of the feeding program. So, in the 2008/2009 school year, the Feed the Body to Reach the Brain project became one of the Rice Raiser Campaign’s Global projects.

For that entire year, the students received their lunch meal. Now, this project has moved to become one of our ongoing projects under Keeping the Doors Open. It costs approximately $.50 to feed a child. Please help us continue to provide these nutritious meals to the students in Dumay so that they can continue their education and be better equipped to care for themselves in their future.

Through contributing to this ongoing Adopt-a-School project, schools can meet the Grade 6 British Columbia Curriculum Prescribed Learning Outcome AF “It is expected that students will implement a plan of action to address a selected local or global problem or issue.”

In many developing countries it is a fact that many children have only one meal per day and sometimes that has to last them two days in lean times. Statistics indicate that a meal program can increase school attendance by 100% and provides children with a much improved capacity to learn.

To read more about this project, please see our resources for a Special Report PDFPDF.