Healthy breakfast healthy lifestyle..... in lots of ways

This week is healthy life style week culminating in a sports day on Friday for the students at my Tu Xuong campus in central Vietnam. One activity running this week is breakfast club, where the children pay 20,000 Vn Dong and come to school for a “healthy” breakfast, and our physed specialist discusses nutrition and the need to have food at the start of the school day. Yesterday and today I volunteered to do my bit and cook scrambled eggs. In truth yesterday I forgot, turned up late and had to dry dishes. Learning curve. Today I went to the canteen, where all the school meals are served and prepared, early and got promoted to cooking toast.
The children prepared and cooked lots of the food and then sat to eat while the staff available became the serving staff. Breakfast included baked beans and scrambled eggs on toast, toast with various spreads, various fresh fruits, yoghut, cornflakes and fruit juice. Bananas, the large ones not the tiny lady or finger bananas were the most popular fruit..
This of course is a typical Western meal, where many of these children being Asian, probably eat noodles and rice for breakfast. The Vietnamese eat phu (fur) which is a soup that has noodles, a little meat and a few vegetables in it. Today was year 5’s breakfast. It was interesting to note that some children had trouble or were unsure how to go about buttering toast, or eating with a knife. Most abandoned the knife and used the fork and a spoon. Others had no problems and put a variety of spreads on their toast.
In this global world where lots of these children hold duel passports and travel frequently they have the ability to cross over from one culture to another and adapt the culinary tools of the culture, all be it chop sticks or knife and fork. Am I that adaptable? For other children who live with maids and nannies, independence is not an achieved state, and having your toast buttered for you in the morning is a routine that is possibly outside the students control.
The manners of these children is worth noting. Even with the bigger groups of older children, they sat around the tables, ate the food, boys intermingled with girls, talked and listened to each other. It definitely was not a noisy time, just a group of kids enjoying each others company over a meal. Well done guys.