April 2010

by Jacqueline Burt

Follow Amy Kalafa's advice and you might insist your kids brown-bag their lunch from now on. "Have lunch with your child in the school cafeteria one day," says the mother-of-two and award-winning documentary filmmaker. "Take a look around at what is being served and what is being eaten. Check in with your gut and see what you feel!"

Amy's guess is that you won't feel great. That's why she teamed up with Chappaqua, N.Y. mom and nutritionist and Susan Rubin to chronicle why schools need to improve their lunches, and how some have already started the process. The resulting film is "Two Angry Moms," a title inspired by former Texas Agricultural Secretary Susan Combs' comment: "It will take two million angry moms to change school food." The plan? To grow from two to two million, of course.

Amy started to get angry when the healthy lunches she packed for her daughters were consistently discarded or ignored in favor of junk food offered at school, but she reached her boiling point when reports of a national children's health crisis made headlines. The statistics were startling: 35% of American children are obese or at risk. 30% of boys born in 2000 and 40% of girls will develop diabetes. 50% of all cancer could be prevented through healthy diet and exercise. The cost of fresh fruits and vegetables has risen 40% in the past twenty years. The cost of soda, sweets, meat, dairy, fats and oils has decreased by as much as 20% in that same time. The CDC reports that "this generation will be the first in our nation's history to live shorter lives than those of their parents." (Incidentally, the American life expectancy ranks 27th in the world.)

"Two Angry Moms" is part exposé, part how-to, according to Amy. The film shows what's wrong with current school lunch programs (high fat, sodium and sugar content, for starters, not to mention artificial ingredients and additives) and chronicles the efforts of pioneering parents and chefs like Alice Waters and Tony Geraci who work to bring healthy, locally-grown, sustainable cuisine to the cafeteria table.

It's easy to join the movement for bettering school food, Amy says. One way to start is by hosting a screening of "Two Angry Moms" for parents and teachers in your school district (to find out how, go to www.angrymoms.org).

"If you're not angry about what is being served in your kid's school, maybe you ought to be!"

http://www.thedailynorwalk.com/wellness/westport-mom-gets-angry-about-school-lunch

Enlarging Their World
By Lawrence Goodman

In 1978 Maria Lauenstein and Sonam Denjongpa moved to the Indian state of Sikkim, hoping to start a school. They had met a few years earlier at Brown, after Lauenstein's brother, who had recently returned from a stint in Nepal as a Peace Corps volunteer, asked her if she knew anyone on campus who spoke Nepali. A professor steered Lauenstein to Denjongpa, who'd grown up in Sikkim speaking both Nepali and English. At the time, Sikkim was still a semi-independent kingdom, and Denjongpa was at Brown thanks to its American-born queen, Hope Cooke, who had awarded him a scholarship to study there. The couple became inseparable after their first meeting and were married shortly after Lauenstein's graduation.
 

Courtesy Lauenstien Denjongpa Family Maria Lauenstien (front row, left) with Taktse staff.

By 1978 Sikkim had been incorporated into India, and the transition was rough. Lauenstein and Denjongpa wanted their school to help preserve indigenous culture, an approach that Lauenstein says the Indian government treated with hostility. Four years after Lauenstein had arrived in Sikkim, she received a telegram from the government saying she had ten days to leave the country. She and Denjongpa moved to Massachusetts, where for the next twenty years they ran a catering company.

Every year, though, Denjongpa returned to visit Sikkim, and when he went back in 2002—this time with Lauenstein—he found himself sitting around a campfire with friends talking abut Sikkim's school system. "In that part of the world, education is based on a nineteenth-century British model," says Lauenstein. "It was designed to create clerks for the empire." The emphasis, she says, is on handwriting, spelling, and staying within the margins of a sheet of paper. When a member of the campfire group threw out the idea of starting their own school, everyone agreed it was sorely needed. Two years later, $460,000 had been raised and contractors broke ground on construction.
 

The Taktse International School opened in 2006. It now has around 150 students and runs up to the start of high school and has become an oasis of progressive education high in the Himalayas. Students sit on carpets laid out in a circle on the floor, and the size of classes is limited to twenty, about half the number common in nearby schools. The Takste School also rejects some of the country's more antiquated educational traditions. "We weren't going to allow beating in the school," Lauenstein says. "There wasn't going to be any public humiliation."

The Taktse curriculum focuses heavily on instilling a love of reading, but also involves frequent class trips to local government buildings, doctors' offices, and rice farms. "Educating is connecting to and understanding the world around you," Lauenstein says. She notes that parents were distrustful of the school's approach at first. "The parents wondered what kind of learning could be going on when the children were having so much fun," she says.
 

Taktse's goal is to help children cope with the onslaught of industrialization and modernization by giving them literacy and other practical skills while teaching an appreciation of the environment. "Kids who would not speak can now articulate full ideas," Lauenstein says. "We see kids who were basic readers now reading to enlarge their world."

http://www.brownalumnimagazine.com/content/view/2481/32/

Taktse International School is a Serendipity Project of the Marion Institute.