A group of children is sitting in a semi-circle in the hall of Marlborough Primary in Chelsea when the subject of school dinners comes up.
Nine-year-old Hussein leaps up and says: "On Fridays we get fish-fingers and chips, but the rest of the week they give us disgusting things, like cauliflower and carrots!" The other children vigorously add complaints of their own.
Felix Ouma, head of Opande Primary School, Kenya
Of these eight children attending Marlborough, where 35 languages are spoken and a quarter of the pupils get free school lunches, seven say they have their own computers, six own Nintendos and five have televisions in their bedrooms.
When they discover that most children from Opande Primary School in western Kenya - with whom they will exchange letters as part of the School Linking Programme supported by the Evening Standard's Christmas Appeal - have no shoes, no electricity, no plumbed water, frequently go hungry and have never heard of an iPod, their jaws drop.
Jessica Finer, 47, Marlborough's headteacher, says that by twinning their inner-city school with rural Opande, her pupils will "be offered a unique opportunity to have their eyes opened about life in Africa, and to see how incredibly privileged they are".
Marlborough is one of the first schools to sign up to the School Linking Programme initiated by Plan UK, the British arm of the charity Plan International, which aims to partner 2,000 UK schools with schools in Kenya, Malawi and Sierra Leone. Ms Finer said: "The Evening Standard Christmas Appeal is a brilliant idea and I urge other London schools to get involved in this programme."
Last week the Evening Standard visited Marlborough's twin school on the shores of Lake Victoria and found pupils desperately eager for an education. But they must brave poverty, malaria and even risk attack by leopards on the walk from their isolated villages over an hour away.
Opande, we learned, had faced imminent closure in 2004 due to a chronic shortage of teachers and poor exam results. Plan International poured resources into the school, built new classrooms, provided water tanks, a kitchen for school dinners, donated textbooks and helped to train teachers - and the result is a school transformed into the top performing school (of 29) in the district.
Opande's inspirational headteacher, Felix Ouma, 39, welcomed his school's link with Marlborough Primary. "This programme is about building friendship and learning from one another," he said. "It will be invaluable to our teachers to exchange notes on curriculums and teaching methods, and it will motivate our pupils to work harder."
He proudly introduced a dozen children from across their eight yeargroups. "We call them, the best of the best," he said and singled out a 14-year-old who had beaten 400 other pupils to come first in the district. "What's extraordinary about this girl," he said, "is that she is an orphan who has achieved this without parents."
The two schools are due to make their first exchange of letters, photographs and learning materials before Christmas.
"Our school is a cross-section of London society," says Jessica Finer. "Making a link with Opande is going to be a great learning experience for teachers, parents and children alike. The programme is also sustainable - the children will have an opportunity to build their relationships over years."
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