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July 17, 2011
I am incredibly happy to announce that the community kitchen for Tibetan refugees is finally open! We opened our doors last week and have been serving 30-40 refugees every day. Refugees can pay 90 Rupees for a weekly meal plan or 15 Rs for an individual meal. Many of the refugees that come to our kitchen qualify for free meals since they have no earning resource. We are only serving a small number of refugees right now because we are interested in monitoring what works well and what doesn't in the context of the functionality of the kitchen. Furthermore, we are only serving one meal a day right now in an attempt to start out small. As time goes on and our program expands, we hope to do two things. Open the kitchen for dinner to the refugees and open the kitchen to foreigners as well. The foreigners will be charged significantly more per meal and this will help sustain the kitchen. Currently, we are using money that was left over from the initial $25,000 to buy food. A generous donor also helped us form a connection with her Church in Alabama. Her Church has pledged money to us every month to help pay for food. Also very exciting is that we started serving meals to the students at Deep Jyoti this past week as well. I am extremely excited about this. The weekly schedule of food is bananas on Mondays, Tuesday, Thursdays and Fridays. Healthy porridge will be cooked and served on Wednesdays and lentils and rice will be served on Saturdays. We worked very closely with Chandan and Prabin, the two directors of DJ when putting this menu together. As we increase funding, we hope to substitute more banana days out for heartier meals. All in all, the trip to India has been extremely successful so far. I am looking forward to the next four weeks, when we will be focusing more on media outreach and installing the health curriculum for the refugees who come to LHA.
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