Last August we reported that the Good People Fund made a grant to cover the cost of fresh fruit to Gabriel Project Mumbai, a program started by Jacob Sztokman and dedicated to fighting hunger, child labor, malnutrition and illiteracy for the children living in the Mumbai slums. Jacob wrote this morning and shared the following story:

I was sitting with the women from the kitchen and asked them how the fruit program is doing. They told me that they love it because the kids are happy to receive fruit. Fruit, as opposed to their meals, make children happy, literally happy. I don’t know, I understood fruit being an important part of a child’s nutrition but I didn’t think about the fact that 1000 children receive a sense of happiness from receiving fruit. It’s really nice.

Indeed it is nice, but even nicer was the rest of Jacob’s note which shared that the women in the kitchen (which the Good People Fund helped underwrite) who prepare the kids’ lunches in a micro-enterprise arrangement are about to receive cooking lessons from a nearby famous cooking school (including learning how to bake–something no one does since they have no stoves!) and after completing those lessons plan to prepare box lunches for workers in offices outside the slums.

Talk about “giving a man/woman a fishing pole and teaching him/her how to fish”…we could not be happier about how our donations were used in both cases!