FREE LUNCH:Netizens fund a program that feeds school children in impoverished areas (PENG ZHAOZHI)

Journalist Deng Fei never imagined there were children in China so poor that they could not afford lunch. So when a visiting teacher from Shaba Primary School in Qianxi County in southwest China's Guizhou Province told him that many students were going hungry over the noontime break, he decided to leave Beijing and have a look.

"When I got there, I found that the situation was even worse than what the teacher had told me," said Deng, adding that many other nearby schools also had the same problem.

Most of the children only ate some steamed bread for their lunch. Some of them even stayed hungry at noon.

Deng was moved by the situation. After he came back from Guizhou, he posted the idea of launching a program that could help children in impoverished regions have free lunch on his Sina Weibo, China's biggest microblog website. To his surprise, his proposal sparked a great response and many people offered to help.

That single tweet has brought a change to many primary schools in impoverished regions in central and west China. This April marks the one-year anniversary of the charity Deng founded, proving there is such thing as a free lunch.

Sixty-six students from Ping'an Hope School, Touzhai Town of Huining County in northwest China's Gansu Province are among the latest children to benefit from the program. On February 27, they were served their very first hot lunch from the new canteen.

"I can see the students' parents are very glad to see their children having lunch at school, as many of them came to the school especially to see whether they can help," headmaster Liu Xiaojun told ChinAfrica. "The lunch is nutritional, with meat and vegetables, even better than the food they eat at home." He noted that primary school students are in their prime period of physical growth. "They need nutrition to grow healthily," stressed Liu.

More importantly, Liu's school does not have to pay. The non-governmental organization led by Deng Fei and supported by nearly a million netizens built the canteen and covers the daily expenses, including paying the cook.

"What I need to do is to update my school's microblog to publicize the daily expenses so that the public can see how the money is spent," said Liu. According to the headmaster, after helping his school establish the canteen, the program provides 3 yuan ($0.47) to cover lunch for each child, which is enough considering the local cost of living. Meanwhile, the program also pays 800 yuan ($127) a month to the cook.

High standards

Deng, a journalist from Hong Kong-based Phoenix Weekly, banded together with more than 500 other journalists nationwide to found this program, called Free Lunch. Its mandate is to provide nutritional lunches for primary school students in impoverished regions.

"We have strict norms to measure whether a school is qualified for the Free Lunch program. This way, we can ensure that we are helping those who are really in need," Deng told ChinAfrica. Before lunching the program in a school, a two-month pilot project of providing free eggs to students is tested. "Through the pilot project, we can see whether the school can manage," said Deng.

"My school meets the qualification of the program because Huining County is a national-level impoverished county," said Liu. He noted most of the parents of the children in his school are working in big cities, and children are left at home with their grandparents. "So, we decided to apply for the program. After hard work and a successful pilot program, we finally won the project."