Lesinewu opens his mouth and bites into an invisible tower of bread he is pretending to hold in his hands. He is in grade six and an athlete for Riverlea Primary, a small school in the south-west of Johannesburg. He says he needs six sandwiches because he is always running.
Almost a third of his school’s 890 pupils receive a daily government lunch. For some of the children, it’s their only meal for the day.
The National School Nutrition Programme (NSNP), taken over by the Department of Education from the Department of Health in 2004, feeds five million children at 15 000 primary schools in South Africa — a R99-million task. It counters short-term hunger in areas where poverty is most extreme.
Michelle Moothoo (39), a grade-six teacher at Riverlea, says that for many of the children a peanut-butter-and-jam sandwich or a nutritious biscuit is the only food they see each day. If the pupils don’t receive the food, they become “unruly and disruptive”.
On Mondays, many children haven’t had a proper meal all weekend. Moothoo says some can’t even concentrate until they have something in their stomachs, which usually happens by mid-morning when “the aunties” deliver sandwiches to each class for children who are on the feeding programme.
Elizabeth Nare, Charmaine Matthews and Katrina Hendricks, the so-called “aunties”, prepare the sandwiches early in the morning from a small room where they store the weekly supply of 140 loaves of bread, 25kg of juice powder, 120kg of butter, 20 litres of jam and four boxes of nutritious biscuits — commonly known as “dog biscuits” to the children because of their bland, cardboard-like taste and texture.
Although usually punctual, on this particular day the bakery’s new driver has gotten lost, so the bread delivery is running late. A group of boys gathers at the door of the school “kitchen” to see where the sandwiches are. “The bread hasn’t come yet, babies. We’ll bring it when it does,” says Matthews.
One of the boys looks at her defiantly and says: “Now we can’t gym.”
Nare (57) — or Auntie Liz, as everyone affectionately calls her — says there are always about 18 students who come to the kitchen after school for more sandwiches. “We always keep four loaves of bread for after school for pupils who are still hungry.”
Vuyo, another grade-six pupil, is one of these children. He walks more than 5km after school to his home in Zamampilo, a township near Riverlea. Without the extra food he gets tired on his way home.
But what happens over weekends and during holidays? “We don’t know,” says Moothoo. “Because of crime and drug and alcohol abuse in this area, they [the children] have to fend for themselves during holidays and on weekends.
“If we see a child is having problems or not getting fed, and we go to the parents’ house and you see a mother sitting there with a bottle of beer in her hand, what can we do?”
Rural challenges
Riverlea still has it easy compared with schools in rural and particularly rainy areas of the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal.
Katharine Hall researches child-poverty alleviation at the Children’s Institute in Cape Town. She was part of a team that conducted an evaluation of the NSNP, and says food trucks often become stuck in mud on their way to schools in rainy rural areas, meaning schools don’t receive food for up to a week at times.
“A road is a basic requirement for the delivery of any services,” she says.
KwaZulu-Natal has the highest number of pupils (about 1,2-million) being fed by the programme, and the programme in the Eastern Cape serves about a million.
Hall also says that “the milkshake” — a nutritious powdered drink that the Riverlea pupils rejected because they hated the taste and opted for juice instead — is subject to the availability and safety of water in some schools.
“We have worked in rural villages which have no sanitation or municipal water supply, and there are concerns that the natural sources from which water is drawn are contaminated. Provision of free basic water to schools is important for health and nutrition.”
Like Riverlea, most schools receive “the cold-meal menu option” — sandwiches and biscuits. Schools are also supposed to receive a hot meal (pap and beans or soya; samp and beans; or soya with vegetables wherever possible), but this does not always happen, says Hall.
The deputy principal of Riverlea, Marcelle Elephant, confirms that his school is still waiting in line for cooked meals. “We haven’t received anything yet.”
Exclusion
The NSNP excludes high-school students and, in some cases, older primary-school students, says Hall. “For instance, while it is rolled out to children up to the end of grade seven in the Western Cape, it is only implemented up to grade four in the Eastern Cape — and the older children get the leftovers, if they’re lucky.”
A spokesperson for the Department of Education, Panyaza Lesufi, says there is no nutrition programme at secondary schools at present because no budget has been allocated.
Some children who were on the nutrition programme in primary school suffer from a lack of concentration when they reach high school because they no longer receive their daily meal. He says the programme should expand to high schools.
At primary schools such as Riverlea, at least, the programme is boosting regular attendance and “putting some food in children’s stomachs on the basis that a child cannot learn on an empty stomach”, says Hall.
A tiny grade-six pupil whose baggy uniform hangs loosely on his small frame imagines what he would do if the feeding scheme didn’t exist. “I’d have to drink a lot of water,” he says, laughing.