Children enjoying a warm school lunch provided by FIV in Lang Son at the Tan Lien Elementary School
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), there are 13.8 million undernourished people in Vietnam . . . that number includes children.
The 5LE Fund’s Food for Thought Lunch Project was initially created to provide lunches to the Lang Son Tan Lien Elementary school children, who walk an hour each way to school – often in inclement weather, that could not return home mid-day for lunch due to the distance. Students at Tan Lien are from often discriminated-against ethnic minorities in the surrounding areas. We then also discovered that even if some of the children could make it home and back in time for lunch, there often was not adequate food for them at home to eat.
You can make a donation to the Food for Thought Lunch Project in any amount, at any time. There is no recurring sponsorship amount or requested minimum. The 5LE school lunch includes a source of protein (meat or eggs), yogurt, rice, vegetables, and fruit. The cost is 40 cents per day per child. There is no overhead taken out of donations. All the money goes directly to the school lunch project and then into little tummies!
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Make a donation to the Food for Thought Lunch Project in any amount you choose via Paypal by clicking here:
Some of these children are extremely malnourished, affecting their ability to benefit from the education they are fighting to attain. Nutritional deficiencies have been shown to have a negative effect on learning behavior in mice as far back as 1951.¹ Citing “Better learning performance is associated with diet induced effects on learning and memory ability.”² Moreover, you don’t need science to know that when you are literally hungry, you just can’t concentrate much less learn something new.
Our families are highly committed to their children’s schooling, seeking to do everything they can for their children to get a formal education, understanding that it is the only way out of a cycle of poverty. These families also participate in our “Lay-It-Forward” Chicken Project to enable them to increasingly provide for themselves and send eggs for the children’s lunches. We are working with the families to expand their broods and be able to pass on a few chicks to neighbors in need as well.
Nine Thousand Six-Hundred Lunches Served Last Year!
Healthy, well-balanced, warm lunches provided by your donations to FIV make all the difference for learning minds and growing bodies.
Last school year, August 2010 – May 2011, the 5LE Fund supplied 60 children with healthy, and warm, cooked lunches: 5 days a week, 4 weeks per month, for 9 months, less 4 weeks for holidays and school closures due to extreme cold. That’s 9,600 lunches for just last year! We are so proud and happy to be a part of feeding children’s tummies! Our warm lunches are also now supplemented by our Sustainable Vegetable Garden on the school premises!
¹ Whitley JR, O’Dell BL, Hogan AG (September 1951). “Effect of diet on maze learning in second generation rats; folic acid deficiency”. J. Nutr. 45 (1): 153–60. PMID 14880969.
² Umezawa M, Kogishi K, Tojo H et al. (February 1999). “High-linoleate and high-alpha-linolenate diets affect learning ability and natural behavior in SAMR1 mice”. J. Nutr. 129 (2): 431–7. PMID 10024623.
