The garden started as a science project in one grade and is now eleven beds along the eastern wall, worked by a club of about forty children on two afternoons a week.
What grows: chillies, cucumber, aubergine, curry leaf, papaya, and a bed of watermelon that is a matter of some pride. The canteen takes everything, cooks it, and sells it at the counter for the same ten rufiyaa, which means the children eat what they grew and know they did.
The teaching in it is real rather than decorative. Grade seven measures the beds and the yields and works out the arithmetic. Grade four keeps the watering record. Grade nine has done a term of proper science on the compost and the soil.
The part the teachers talk about most is different. In a school where a child who struggles in lessons has very few places to be good at something, the garden is one. Two of the four children who run the watering rota are children who find written work very hard, and in the garden they are the ones the others ask.
The association paid for the fence and the tools. The school pays for the water. The children do the rest and the produce has never once been sold outside the canteen, which was a decision taken early and has kept the whole thing simple.
