Tiffin Time!

Meet the ladies who make lunch for the GPM slum kids every day! These women are from Kalwa, gathering as friends and neighbors to run the kitchen from start to finish.

They cook in a cramped room every morning - slicing, mixing, and prepping on the floor or over burners. The job of making tiffins (lunch) for the kids in their own slum gives them a steady income, earned totally from their personal planning and labor. This is uncommon for women in the slum. Most depend on their husband’s livelihood. The cheery women in the kitchen however, have the skills to manage a budget, feed around 500 children a day, and flip their flowy saris over their shoulder without catching fire as they cook.

As GPM fellows, we join the ladies weekly to help with the prep work. They seem settled in the kitchen and attached to their work. In the overwhelmingly hot room, chatting and laughing join the chopping and bubbling sounds of cooking.

On the first day we visited, the women were making chapati – a thin flatbread. I attempted to roll one out, but rather than creating a perfect circle like the rest, my chapati had a likeness to the shape of India - obviously intentional. 

On the menu that day was Laapsi - a sweet porridge made from semolina with coconut and almonds. We observed the women’s system to get the food to the classrooms. They transfer the food from two ginormous vats into smaller containers, measuring each on a scale. Then the ladies hoist the tin containers on their heads and walk to the classrooms, gracefully balancing the food while avoiding trash heaps, mud puddles, and rampant chickens.

Every day I see the women deliver the food to the class, which can be distracting to the kids as I’m teaching. I see how excited they are for lunch! After class ends, the teacher of the class gives each student two scoops into their outstretched tupperware or tin bowl. The kids know this system well – they don’t compete for the food or hog it. They know their portion. Often students will take their friend’s or sibbling’s tupperware and get lunch for them too. About half of the kids plop down and immediately scoop up the mush with their fingers. The other half scoots away home, happily clutching their tiffin.

The kitchen is essential. Without the hot lunch at the end of every school day, enrollment in the life-altering education would drop. The promise of lunch eases a parent's burden of having another mouth to feed in the family. A mother or father is then more likely to send their child to class - the building block for the future of these slum kids. The kitchen not only empowers the women who run it, but their own community’s future.

The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily represent the positions, strategies or opinions of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee