Her meals program for mountain children began with one egg

Ms. Deng's charity began with a lunch she saw while volunteer-teaching.

It was more than a decade ago, on a short teaching stint at a village primary school deep in the mountains. At noon the children opened their lunch boxes: nearly all plain rice and pickles, and for a few of them, not even pickles. She asked how often they ate meat. The children thought for a long while. One boy said: "New Year."

She lay awake that night. The next day she made a small decision: one boiled egg for every child in the class, every day.

An egg cost a few cents. She paid from her own pocket and arranged with the school's little shop to deliver eggs each morning by headcount. The children's reaction she still remembers: no cheering — they held the eggs quietly, carefully. Some couldn't bear to eat them and tucked them into their backpacks to take home. She adjusted the method: eggs were peeled right there in the classroom. "I only rest easy once I've watched them eat it."

Six months into the eggs, she noticed that the "project" was growing faster than she was. Friends heard about it and joined; donations grew. Beyond the eggs she added milk; later, meat twice a week. She set herself three iron rules, which became the program's "constitution":

• No money passes through anyone's hands — a dedicated account for dedicated funds, every expense published.
• No curveballs — only things she can commit to long-term, like "one egg and one carton of milk a day." "What charity fears most is three loud months and then nothing — the children's expectations smashed a second time."
• No photographing, no publicizing the children — donors can see the accounts, never the children's faces.

Ten years on, the program that started with one egg has become a meals program covering twelve village primary schools: every morning at ten, each child gets an egg and a carton of milk — enough, in her words, "to hold them through the morning's lessons." She has never published the program's total spending. There is only one number she has shared: across those twelve schools, the average height-and-weight figures — the gap with the county-town schools, visible to the naked eye, has been narrowing for ten years running.

A good cause can start as small as an egg. Small doesn't matter. What matters is that it is there every single day — and growing bodies believe in nothing so much as "every single day."

She herself remains the most "mysterious" figure in the children's eyes. Some think she is a teacher; some think the eggs are "sent down from above." She never corrects them. "What children need is eggs and milk, not to know who I am. When they grow up and learn that the eggs of their childhood were bought by a stranger, some auntie they never met — whatever grows in their hearts then will be worth more than a hundred thank-yous said now."

She has had her darkest hour too. A few years ago a handful of voices online accused her of "staging a show" and raised questions about the books; the noise was everywhere. She went sleepless for a night, and the next day did two things: opened the accounts down to every single purchase receipt, and kept the program running. She told the donors: "Check whatever you like. If I stop for one day, the children miss one day of eggs — that would be the only real problem here." When the storm passed, the program was sturdier than before — an audit firm came to her on its own and helped reinforce the whole system.

She is in her fifties now, half her hair gone white. Asked how long this "egg program" will go on, she points down the mountain: "Until the children's nutrition is no worse than the city kids'. On that day I'll retire and go home to boil eggs for my grandson."