Our day students and all of our students in boarding schools depend on food at school. For the day schoolers, it is their main—and sometimes their only—meal. In many places, we provide meals for children during school recesses, and even on Sunday.
Almost every day we get pleas to provide food for “our kids” during the pandemic. In about 4 weeks, we have sent almost $50,000 in food aid to children and university students whom we sponsor in Kenya, Uganda, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, Slovakia, Mexico, and Guyana—across 5 continents. And we will get repeat and new requests regularly as long as schools are closed.
Of course, no one is in school now, and families are desperate.
In some cases, we are asked to feed families, in part because children really cannot go to places where during regular times we could bring them together, but also because many of the parents of the very poor are part of the informal economy or are day laborers. They have no safety net.
The Bill Cook Foundations is responding. We are feeding families, some of which are quite large with many children and grandparents. The food is primarily rice, cornmeal, cooking oil, and perhaps some fresh fruit. Courageous people, including some of the children, take the food from home to home in slums where social distancing is impossible.
We also have situations in which children we are helping have no homes to go to or cannot go to their homes. In Cameroon we support with school fees and housing students who have been displaced by civil war and now live in the two large cities, Douala and Yaounde. Their village was destroyed during civil violence. We did not provide food for them because they ate at school. Now we feed them. In Kampala, Uganda, we have placed 13 boys who lived on the street in boarding schools. We are actively searching for housing so that they do not go back to the streets. We have a family of three college-age girls and one high school boy who live with grandparents. We are taking them food tomorrow.
We know nearly everyone is stretched thin these days. But if you can, please consider a donation to the Bill Cook Foundation to support these children and their families. We will continue to feed their bodies even if our schools can’t currently feed their minds. Thank you for your continued support.
