school lunch

We have made the switch to serving local food instead of imported food for the school lunch program.
This switch has been in the planning stages for two years. We have just begun and realize that there will be challenges and we will need to be prepared to make changes and adjustments.

We made the switch for several reasons.
1) keep the money in the local economy. We have been working with farmers to organize into an association to improve farming techniques and develop markets.
2) decentralize the responsibility of purchasing food. Previously one person was responsible for buying all of the food for our five schools spread over a wide area. This frequently meant delays and buying food in large quantities, Buying food in large quantities meant storage problems and problems with insects and rats.Buying in quantities also meant going to Port au Prince which meant additional transport cost.
3) Lack of variety.

We now have put the responsibility in the hands of the local school director. They work with the cooks and the teachers to create menus and purchase food. They are given a weekly budget of 17 HG, (25 US cents), per meal based on school attendance, number of teachers and cooks.
We are monitoring by using reports.

From preliminary observation of one school, they purchased:
Haitian rice
black beans
wheat
corn
pitimi
oil
spices
fish
bread
oranges for juice
tomato sauce
spinach
salt
They also used doleaf (sp) from school property.

I will share more as we move forward.