By Daphne Davies | Volunteer journalist
This is what Adama - a single parent in Freetown, Sierra Leone - said after enrolling her children in the We Are the Future (WAF) School, where they are now receiving a healthy meal each day, thanks to the WAF Kids' Kitchen project.
The We Are the Future Kitchen Garden in Sierra Leone, is going from strength to strength. In a country where undernourishment is the cause of half of child deaths, providing children with a healthy meal each day - often the only one they will receive - will keep them more resilient in the face of diseases that still kill so many young children today.
Since starting the project in 2015, the impact has been amazing: absences due to illness were reduced by 80%, enrolment increased by 15% and grades improved by 65%.
Knowing that their children are going to get something to eat helps the parents as well. Adama, the 34-year-old single mother, we quoted at the beginning, has two children: Christiana, aged nine, and Michael, aged seven. She sells whatever goods she can get at the market to make enough money to feed them, but it's still almost impossible to make sure growing children get enough to eat.
She particularly noticed that Christiana was very lanky, because she wasn’t eating enough nutritious food, so after hearing from other parents how their children were benefitting from the Kitchen Garden Project, she decided to send Christiana and Michael to the We Are the Future school.
She soon noticed the improvements: “I’m surprised that just within the first term at We Are the Future, Christiana is already active and doing well with other children at school and at home. My husband abandoned us, but we have found a provider - God bless Bread and Water for Africa for feeding my children”.
We know Christmas is an expensive time of year, but we were wondering if you'd consider making another donation to the Kids' Kitchen Garden project today. It only costs £12 to feed a child like Christiana, every day for two months, or £72 to make sure she has enough food on her plate for a whole year. This keeps children like Christiana healthy and helps struggling parents like Adama see that their children are happy at last. That's really the best Christmas gift she could wish for. Thank you so much for keeping them in your thoughts.
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