Society

Rural schools get free meals

By Qiu Bo and He Dan (China Daily)
Updated: 2011-06-02 08:37

Students at Shaba primary school in Huaxi village of Qianxi county, in Guizhou province, enjoy a free lunch. Zhao Junxia / for China Daily

QIANXI, Guizhou - Liu Yan, a 12-year-old primary school girl from a rural village in a remote region of China, did not expect that her wish to have lunch every day at school would come true thanks to the Internet.

To her surprise, an online campaign started in April has prompted millions of netizens to give money to ensure she and others like her can enjoy free lunches.

Deng Fei, a journalist at the Phoenix Weekly magazine and an initiator of the campaign, said he felt unsettled when he learned that many students in mountainous regions of Southwest China's Guizhou province often go hungry.

Their lack of a steady diet has several causes. Not only are their families poor but their homes are also in a remote village, far away from schools.

Liu Yan is one of the students who often finds herself without anything to eat at midday.

Liu, a sixth grader in a primary school in Hongban village, Zhongjian town, Qianxi county, has to walk at least 8 kilometers to school every day.

The trek takes her more than two hours to complete. If she does not get up early and leave at six in the morning, when it is still dark outside, she will not arrive on time.

Most of the journey takes her along a muddy and bumpy mountain path. The road conditions become especially bad during rainy weather.

Usually, she finds it impossible to return home for lunch during the two-hour break she gets at noon.

"More than half of the other 173 students are in the same predicament that Liu is," Xia Weigui, headmaster of the school, told China Daily.

For Liu and many of her friends in the village, corn meal and pickled cabbage, which local farmers get from their fields, make up the bulk of their dinners at home. "My mother only cooks rice at festivals," Liu said.

Some of Liu's schoolmates bring homemade lunches to them at school. But Liu's parents rarely do that for her.

"They cannot get up early and cook for me, since they have to get enough sleep to do farm work during the day," Liu said. "And it's embarrassing if my friends see me eating corn meal."

Rather than be despised for her diet - as she fears she will be - and to avoid bothering her parents, Liu prefers to go hungry.

"You can tell who didn't have lunch, especially in the afternoon's physical-education class," said Liu Jinquan, a teacher.

Zhongjian town is one of the "hundred poorest towns" in Guizhou province and Hongban village is the poorest part of Zhongjian town.

According to Li Jian, education inspector for the town, the town contains six villages, each of which maintains a primary school. Of the roughly 1,000 students in the town, most have to walk an hour to two hours to go to school. "It's common to see pupils walking three to five kilometers to get to school," Li said, adding that the distance has led many pupils in the town and elsewhere in the province to miss out on eating lunch.

Deng, the journalist, learned of the situation after a local volunteer group, which had visited the primary schools, told various news organizations that many students in the village were going hungry during lunchtimes. Surprised, Deng decided to visit other schools and learn if conditions at those places were similar.

After his trip in Guizhou, Deng wrote about the students' difficulties on his micro blog at Weibo.com, a Chinese version of Twitter, and asked for netizens' help in giving free lunches to village students.