Working For A BETTER FUTURE

Spare a thought for the Mary's Meals volunteers, who feed hundreds of pupils as well as running a home

- DANI GARAVELLI

One of the most impressive things about the schools I visit in Turkana is the way individual mothers take charge of cooking and serving the food provided by Mary's Meals.

At each Early Childhood Development centre (ECD) there are volunteer cooks, with white chef hats and bright blue aprons, bent over small fires, stirring giant pots of maize and beans. They take their jobs extremely seriously, arriving early to ensure the fires are lit and the meals are ready by noon.

Perhaps the hardest-working of all is Ewoi Napara at St Luke's Nakururum. Ewoi can't tell me exactly how old she is. In this rural, nomadic part of north-west Kenya, age is not calculated in years but in seasons. She knows she was born in the "season of yellow maize" which means she is somewhere around 30.

Ewoi's life is incredibly tough. She has four children, the youngest of whom is still a toddler, and an older husband who is too frail to help her look after them. Every day, she is up before sunrise, preparing the food, so she can spend her afternoon juggling childcare and looking after the family's animals. It's a big ECD, so it's always a challenge.