The Shed That Fed a Million Children

by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow

  But Father Garry chose not to flee to the capital. As the LURD forces advanced towards Tubmanburg, all other expats and aid organizations left. The archbishop in Monrovia encouraged Father Garry to do the same. But by now those most in need had once again gathered around the church looking for help. And so, remembering the children who had starved here in 1996, he decided to stay. I talked to him on a regular basis. He used to phone me standing on top of a table under a certain mango tree, telling me with a laugh that it was the only place he could always get a good reception. We were able to send him funding on a regular basis via some Lebanese friends who owned a supermarket in Monrovia and had a way to get the funds, or desperately needed food supplies, to him. Meanwhile, the rebel forces were getting closer. Finally, in May 2002, we heard the news that LURD soldiers had attacked and captured Tubmanburg. None of us had any further contact from Father Garry for three weeks. We were devastated and assumed the worst. Then to our delight and surprise we heard news he was in Guinea. A couple of days later he phoned us and told us his story. The young soldiers who took the town after fierce fighting were surprised to find there among the destitute, an eccentric English priest. They got on the radio to their commander for advice and were told not to kill him. So instead they took him captive. When Father Garry’s two close co-workers, Zinnah and Matthew, understood what was happening, they asked the LURD boys to take them too. They wanted to be with him and try to protect him. A three-week trek through the forest ensued before they released them in neighbouring Guinea.

  ‘I have learnt a lot,’ Father Garry told me next time I saw him. ‘For years I have been leading communities and assisting others. And then I became completely destitute with sixteen boy soldiers in authority over me. I depended on them for sustenance and survival. One day one of them saved my life when I slipped as we waded a deep river. Another time I watched them fire a rocket-propelled grenade into a pool and collect the floating dead fish for food. I experienced powerlessness, vulnerability and physical weakness in a new way. I also felt empathy with my captors. I joined the army myself when I was only sixteen, so I was a child soldier once, I suppose. I thank God for that experience, that journey.’

  Finally, in late 2003, following fierce fighting in Monrovia, Charles Taylor resigned, was extradited and later tried for war crimes. The war was over and the largest UN peacekeeping mission in the world was deployed. A short time later I visited Tubmanburg once again. Huge efforts were now under way to disarm the population, including the child soldiers. On the streets some of the boys still had their AK47s and grenade launchers. They still retained their ‘war names’: Kill the Woman, Quick to Fire, Dissident Baby and a dishevelled eleven-year-old called Down to my Level were among the children we met and played football with. But eventually all of them handed over their weapons and referred to those ‘war names’ as if they had been a different person. Twice during that visit, once in a petrol station on the edge of Monrovia and once on a lonely forest track, we ran into Father Garry’s former captors. They greeted him warmly and embraced him. Their mutual affection and respect was obvious. Now they only wanted to regain their childhood and their chance for education. They asked Father Garry when he would reopen St Dominic’s School.

  This became one of our next priorities, the repair and refurbishment of this, the only high school in the area. It had been ransacked and looted of everything. A carpet of spent bullet cases covered the playground in which there was also at least one unmarked grave. We shipped containers full of books and teaching aids to re-stock the school library and re-equip the school, while he set about recruiting new teachers. Of the 600 pupils who eventually enrolled, over half were former child soldiers.

  An incredible hunger for education, and a desperate recognition that without it there would be no escape from grinding poverty, was evident among all the young people I met at the start of that new school term. It was sometimes in jarring contrast to the very different angst that had been gripping my own family at the start of our school year in Scotland – and uncomfortably different to my own childhood memories of dreading the end of each school holiday too.

  I had recently watched with relief as the tears dried and Martha’s limpet grip on Julie at our school gate weakened until at last she forgot to say goodbye before skipping off to see her friends. Now, in Liberia, I watched as a lady in a wheelchair approached Father Garry as he walked back from early morning Mass to eat his breakfast at home. She was pushed by a boy in his mid-teens and had strategically positioned herself on the well-worn path between the church and Father Garry’s house. She explained that she was a mother of nine and had travelled two hours from her home near Monrovia to beg that Father Garry take one of her children into the high school. He tried to explain that he had no places left and that anyway the school only took children from the surrounding three counties. She wailed and shouted in protest. He apologized again and gave her the fare for a taxi ride back to Monrovia. She sat quietly crying while the boy who had pushed her to the door tried to comfort her.

  We also realized that the war had already robbed many older teenagers and young adults of their chance of ever going to school. For them we built a small trade school, hoping vocational skills such as carpentry, bricklaying, sewing and computing might give them the means to find work and support themselves. We also attached to this project a working farm to teach agriculture, as many who had lived in the camps or fought in the war had also lost their traditional farming skills. Situated just beside the spot (now marked by a wooden cross) where the children who had starved during the war were buried, we call this farm ‘The New World’. We bred sheep and goats with a view to repopulating the animal stock in the village – for they had been completely wiped out. Slowly the people began to readjust to peace. But without justice, peace is a hard thing to keep. One of the younger pupils confided in Father Garry that every morning, as he walked from home, he passed the man who he had seen murder his own mother.

  Most of the guns had now gone, piled up rusting in UN compounds, but in some ways that was the easy bit. Truth and reconciliation in a land where tens of thousands of children were drugged and trained to kill is a difficult business. I was talking about this one day to Moses Flomo, an old friend in Tubmanburg, who was a physician assistant and senior member of the mobile clinic team, and he said to me, ‘You have to understand this is not just about the guns. We Liberians need to disarm our hearts.’

  The growth of our work in Liberia was only made possible by the growth of our support back home. By now, a formidable group of fifty volunteers from the Glasgow area had begun to visit a different parish every Sunday where the parishioners had been previously invited to bring their unwanted clothing and bric-a-brac to place in the back of our van on their way into church. These goods were taken back to our warehouses and categorized. Some ended up on containers and trucks headed for Liberia, while others were sent to be sold in our charity shops, which were also being set up and run by groups of amazing, dedicated volunteers. The team collecting goods at the parishes then also began to give talks to the congregations at the invitation of the priests and ministers, and then to sell raffle tickets outside the churches as the congregations left. In time they recruited an incredibly committed team – among whom were teenagers, elderly people, a lady in a wheelchair and a blind gentleman – big enough to be present in at least three parishes each weekend and raising hundreds of thousands of pounds. They created massive awareness and respect of our work. To this day they continue this initiative, sacrificing their weekends, wind, rain or shine, and they humble me and teach me much with their good cheer and self-giving love. I like to describe our work as just a series of lots and lots of little acts of love, and when I do so, I usually think of them standing laughing outside a church in the face of the horizontal Scottish rain.

  6

  A Famine Land

  It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds.

  ST AUGUSTI
NE

  During the first half of 2002 our newspapers and TV stations began to report extensively on a famine unfolding in Southern Africa. Millions of people across several nations faced starvation. The country worst affected, and the one which we heard most about on our news bulletins, was Malawi where at least three million lives were said to be at risk. Despite the many strong historical links between Scotland and Malawi that I would learn of later, I knew very little about this slither of a country, landlocked between Mozambique, Zambia and Tanzania, other than it had once been part of the British Empire and was today among the poorest ten nations on earth. When we began talking about Malawi and discussing if there was anything we might do to help there, the question we all began to ask was, ‘I wonder what ever happened to Gay Russell?’

  Gay was the lady who, nearly twenty years earlier, had written us a letter asking for more information about Medjugorje, having read Ruth’s article about our experience there as teenagers. She had described herself as a pilot in Malawi who flew a small plane. This conjured up romantic images, perhaps partially inspired by a family favourite book, Out of Africa. Although we had received over a thousand letters at that time, Gay was the correspondent that had stuck in our minds. Mum had written her a letter, received a lovely reply and sent another. That was the last we had heard of her.

  While we were having those discussions, and wondering aloud about Gay, the only person we had ever had contact with in Malawi, there was, as always, a group of interesting people staying at Craig Lodge on retreat. Among them was a businessman from the English Midlands called Tony Smith. We had never met him before. When Tony told us that he not only knew Gay Russell, but was currently working with her in Malawi, we were incredulous. Tony described how, following his own conversion experience in Medjugorje some years before, he had had an inspiration to build a replica of the huge cross there on a mountain somewhere in Africa, for those who would never be able to afford to make a pilgrimage from that continent to Medjugorje. In time he had been introduced to Gay and together they were currently building the concrete cross on top of the mountain overlooking the city of Blantyre, in which Gay lived. Tony put us in touch with Gay by email and, following an eighteen-year break, we resumed a warm correspondence with her. Among other things, we learnt that she and her husband David were also involved in supporting famine relief projects in her country. They invited us enthusiastically to come and visit them when we could.

  Meanwhile, we also began to make connections with other people carrying out emergency work in Malawi. Among them was an anthropologist from St Andrews University, who had previously lived in and studied the matrilineal society of the Chewa people in certain villages in the central region. Working with her friends in those villages, she had designed a project to provide food aid in particular villages. The project had two purposes: first to save the people from starvation, and second to allow them to stay in their villages rather than moving to towns and cities in their search for food. In this way they could plant and care for their next crop and prevent their way of life breaking down (as so often happened in famine situations). We launched another appeal to our ever-growing band of generous supporters on behalf of the famished people of Malawi. Hundreds of cheques written by kind people began to arrive at Dalmally and, very soon, Ruth and I began to make plans for our first visit to Malawi. We wanted to visit Gay and the groups she was working with in the southern region, but before that we would take part in the first delivery of food to the two villages in the central region.

  As we drove south from the airport in Lilongwe, towards those villages, we passed the huge government grain silos. We recognized them from recent newspaper articles reporting that the food reserve that should have been stored here, just for a catastrophe like this, had in fact been sold by the government. The silos that could store 167,000 tonnes of maize were found to be completely empty. The government claimed they had been advised by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to sell the reserve in order to help pay off their debt – a claim denied by the IMF who said they had received no payment. Meanwhile an investigation by the Anti-Corruption Bureau had revealed that senior politicians and individuals in the private sector had profited hugely from the sale. Among those accused was the minister responsible for poverty alleviation.

  As we left the city and continued our journey we began to drink in our first impressions of Malawi. It was overwhelmingly beautiful. Each side of the road teemed with people: women with firewood on their heads, men pushing bicycles piled impossibly high with stacks of charcoal and children carrying brightly coloured buckets of water. In the fields beside the road, people were tilling the fields, exposing the soil with hoes, ready for planting. Homes made of mud brick or mud and wattle, with generous thatched roofs, were clustered into little villages by the roadside. Funny-looking baobab trees delighted us, their enormous trunks that tapered towards relatively small crowns giving them the look of a tree turned upside down. Curiously formed hills began to take shape in the haze. On the southern horizon Bunda with its rounded top and Nkhoma, steeper and dramatically pointed, rose brazenly from the surrounding plain, disdaining the support of any foothills. The truck we were following was stacked high with bags of beans and maize flour, the first food consignment for ‘our’ villages, bought from merchants in the city. While helping to organize the procurement of these rations from merchants in the city, I began, for the first time, to consider the fact that hunger and malnutrition are very rarely caused by there being no food available. People starve because they do not have enough money to buy food. Children become malnourished because their parents cannot afford to purchase their most basic daily needs. The fact that hunger is caused by poverty is something I thought about as we left the tar road and made our way along bumpy tracks where thin people were trudging, with a cloud of dust billowing behind us.

  The first thing I noticed when we entered Ngwanda, a village nestled among huge rocks, was a group of men huddled closely on the steps of a house. They surrounded a little transistor radio. I learnt from them later that they were listening to the crackling commentary of Malawi’s biggest football match for years – a cup clash with neighbouring Zambia. But as soon as they saw the truck with food bouncing down the steep track towards their village they rose to greet us with huge smiles. Women hurried from their huts, some with babies strapped to their backs, and children came running from every direction. By the time we climbed out of our car, the women were singing and dancing their welcome to us. The commentator’s voice from the crackling radio was drowned out by their song and shrieks of joy.

  The maize and beans in the truck were an answer to the prayers of this village. Of course they had been informed it was coming. Our friends had worked with the leaders of the community to establish the population of the village and their needs, and to ensure they were ready to organize an orderly distribution. The amount we were delivering here was calculated to be enough food to meet their needs for the next two months. But despite that the people of the village seemed astounded that there, before their very eyes, was the food that would save their lives and the lives of their children. Perhaps more than once they had been made promises that had not been kept.

  Nearly 85 per cent of the people of Malawi are subsistence farmers, living in villages like Ngwanda and surviving on the food they grow on their smallholdings of between one and two acres. Hunger for those that live off the land here is never far away. Their staple is a corn – a white maize – that they grind into flour, dry in the sun and then cook into a paste with boiling water. The result is a dish called Nsima, which my over-stimulated Western palate finds almost tasteless and hard to eat in any quantity. Maize is indigenous to the Americas and was introduced to Malawi by Europeans during the sixteenth century. With its high yields, it soon largely replaced millet and sorghum, which had been the mainstays of the African diet for thousands of years. Today those indigenous crops account for less than 10 per cent of the total planted area, while maize, as a subsistence
crop, has become for Malawi what rice is for Asia. But maize is a thirsty, hungry plant, sucking up large quantities of water and nutrients from the earth, and a series of droughts during the 1990s combined with a lack of fertilizer for the increasingly depleted soil had triggered a spiral of worsening famines. A good harvest might yield just enough for a farmer to feed his family for the year. But now most years were not so good. December, January and February were known as the ‘hungry months’ when the home-grown fare ran out and food prices soared. This year the little roundel stores in the villages had been found empty many months earlier and, by now, starving people across Malawi had in desperation begun to eat roots of trees, maize cobs, sawdust, water lily bulbs and various other things they would not normally have considered as food.

  After the welcome party of Ngwanda eventually stopped singing, one of the older ladies called the people to order. They sat in long rows in the dust and waited for their name to be called from the list. A member of each household, usually a mother or grandmother, took their turn to walk forward to collect their allotment of maize and beans. Each ration – based on the family’s size – was weighed carefully on scales and poured into sacks. I was struck by the patience of those sitting quietly and, while this very lengthy process continued, I noticed an old lady and her grandchild kneeling in the red dust, carefully picking up the few tiny beans that had been spilt. They placed their precious find into a small pot to carry home. Eventually, as the light began to fade quickly and I remembered how short dusk was here, and that we had planned not to be driving after dark, the chief called out the last name on the list. Everyone in the village now had enough food to see them through the next two months. We promised we would be back with more supplies before they ran out, and seeds too so they could plant next year’s crop – the crop that would, hopefully, set them free from reliance on our aid.