The Shed That Fed a Million Children

by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow

  Later that day I drove with Father Owen to visit one of his many dying parishioners. Fostino, a thirty-five-year-old man who had been a tailor, lived with his sister, who was caring for him in a house that sat alone among the dry fields. Fostino had no shirt on and was shockingly thin. Each of his ribs was protruding and his arms were horribly wasted. He groaned and his sister helped him to sit upright. It appeared he was only hours from death. They told us that apart from some mangos, growing on a nearby tree, they had not eaten for nearly a week. He had AIDS and was convinced that he was given the disease as a punishment because he had once stolen a man’s bicycle. He was desperate for that man’s forgiveness as he believed only in that way would he be cured. Father Owen counselled him and prayed with him, before giving him Communion. Fostino and his sister, whose name I never learnt, seemed more peaceful as we left them. As we walked down the path away from the house, the sister caught up with us and with a shy smile handed us a bundle of mangos from their precious tree – a gift for our journey home.

  There were many encounters during those days that moved me deeply and left me questioning things and looking at them in different ways. Everywhere was life and death and very little of the stuff that most often obscures them. I had a strange sense of preparing for something and that this was some kind of intense training course. Before leaving home on this trip, Julie, who was expecting our fourth child, had reminded me it was now nearly ten years since our first trips to Bosnia-Herzegovina. I surprised her by saying that for some reason I felt as if these ten years, while amazing, were a preparation for something else. But I didn’t expect that my next meeting with a suffering family would change my life in the way it did, and lead to the birth of Mary’s Meals.

  A couple of hours’ drive from Namitembo, along dirt-track roads through dry fields, is the parish of Balaka. On arrival here the Italian priests led me to a church which we entered through a side door. I was taken completely by surprise to find myself on the altar, staring down on 550 young children sitting silently in rows. Every one of them was an orphan. Ten years previously the priests here had decided to find sponsors in Italy to support the ten orphans they knew of in their parish. They didn’t intend to do any more than that as they saw no further need. Now there were 8,000 orphans in their parish with the number growing every day. And incredibly, here, and all over Malawi, nearly all of those children orphaned by AIDS were cared for by members of their extended families. Street children and orphanages were not yet known in Malawi. I wondered how different our response in the West might be if we were faced with a disaster that resulted in hundreds of thousands of orphans.

  Father Gamba, a young friendly priest, then asked me if I would like to accompany him to the home of one of his parishioners, who was near death. Thus it was I came to meet that family whose picture remains on the wall above my desk: Emma surrounded by her six children, including fourteen-year-old Edward, who, when I asked him about his hopes in life, gave me an answer I will never forget. ‘I would like to have enough food to eat and I would like to be able to go to school one day’ had been his stark, shocking reply to my question.

  The extent of the ambitions of that fourteen-year-old boy, spoken as if they were a daring dream, shook me for a few reasons. The greatest of these was a conversation I had been having with Tony Smith, the man from England who had reintroduced us to Gay. He continued to support the work to build the cross, which was now evolving into a more ambitious project which would eventually see the building of an exact replica of the church in Medjugorje and the placing of identical Stations of the Cross up Michiru Mountain. His stays at Gay’s house overlapped with my own and he had been talking to me about something that happened to him about two years previously.

  He had been staying at Gay’s house and feeling depressed at the suffering he saw in Malawi, especially that endured by hungry children. One evening, back at Gay’s, he turned on the TV and found himself watching a speech made by the American Senator George McGovern in which he stated, with some passion, that if America decided to fund the provision of one daily meal in a place of education for every child in the world’s poorest countries it would act like a ‘Marshall Plan’ that would lift the developing world out of poverty. Tony said when he heard this speech he was inspired with the thought that if someone took that concept, gave it to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and called it Mary’s Meals, then it would actually happen. He had talked to Gay about this at the time and discussed the idea of beginning such a programme in Malawi. However, the famine situation then began to unfold in Malawi and the funds he sent to Gay under the name of ‘Mary’s Meals’ were instead used for desperately needed emergency food distribution in an area called Chipini, through some nuns we had now met and were also supporting.

  So much of our experience over the last twenty years came together within this one simple concept. Our devotion to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and our surprising encounter with her in Bosnia-Herzegovina as teenagers, the numerous meetings with impoverished children in the years since who were unable to go to school because of poverty and hunger, the words I had just heard Edward speak, and a growing recognition that the problems faced by the world’s poorest communities would only ever be overcome by people who were healthy and who had, at least, a basic education. The promise of a meal could enable those children who worked for their daily bread now to attend class instead, and would encourage parents to send their children to school rather than keeping them at home to help. We had already seen this happen in a very small way in our project begun a couple of years earlier in Targu Mures for the Roma children.

  Edward was certainly not alone in missing class. Around 30 per cent of the children in Malawi of primary-school age were not enrolled in school, despite the fact there were free school places for all. The need to find food, grow food, do paid casual work, care for dying parents and younger siblings was keeping children out of the classroom. Even if they did enrol, all too often they were unable to concentrate and learn because of their hunger, or their attendance rates were dismal because of their own illnesses. Hungry, malnourished children cannot be good students and many, like Edward, had never even had the chance to try.

  Over a third of children who die in the world each year do so because of hunger-related causes. Hunger and malnutrition remain, in the twenty-first century, the biggest global health threat, causing more deaths than AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis put together.

  Hunger is caused by poverty and poverty is caused by hunger. People suffer chronic hunger not because there is no food, but because they cannot afford to buy it. The world produces considerably more than enough food for everyone. Even in that dire famine situation, Edward, if he’d had money, could have travelled into town and bought his family food. But he had no money and so they starved.

  Chronically hungry children cannot develop physically and mentally, nor can they learn at school, and for both these reasons they are deprived of the ability to work productively and support their families as adults. They cannot live the independent dignified life that every person craves. In the developing world, 43 per cent of children are stunted. They will, for the rest of their lives, be smaller in stature than they should have been (and those lives might be very short given that it is estimated that around 18,000 children die of hunger-related causes every day), while 775 million illiterate adults face an almost impossible struggle to earn enough to survive.

  The first thing to do for the hungry child is to give them food. Every parent, every person, knows that. But it is clear that the gift of even a basic education is essential too, if chronic hunger is to be truly vanquished. How can people learn how to irrigate their fields, make fertilizer or diversify their crops if they cannot read or write? How can they pursue other ways to make a living and create wealth beyond growing what they eat? How can illiterate people hold their governments to account? How can they defend themselves against corruption? Or combat the spread of HIV/AIDS? How can other pressing health needs be addressed without
first ensuring the growing child has enough to eat?

  Thus, the mission of Mary’s Meals, to provide one good meal every day in a place of education, for hungry impoverished children, was launched by Edward’s words.

  Of course the idea of serving meals in school is hardly original. Most schoolchildren take it for granted they will eat each day. I certainly did. Each morning in our little primary school in the Scottish Highlands, a sense of anticipation built as a van carrying steel containers of food, cooked at the bigger school at the other end of the loch, arrived at our gates. At least I think that is where it came from – it was always a bit of a mystery to me. We would carry them inside, guessing what might be in them. To find that the bigger containers held steaming meatballs and mashed potatoes made it a good day, although that was a short-lived feeling if the smaller lids were then opened to reveal rhubarb crumble. But I cannot ever remember going through a school day without eating, or even contemplating such a thing. School meals are accepted as essential across the developed world, whether they are funded by governments or by parents handing over ‘dinner money’. In fact, globally, around 368 million children are fed daily at school, but while nearly every child benefits in this way in the world’s richest countries, only around 20 per cent of children in the developing world are provided school meals, with the UN’s World Food Programme feeding nearly 15 million of them. Meanwhile 57 million impoverished children remain out of school, while 66 million more attend the classroom hungry and unable to learn properly.

  The more we talked and thought about Mary’s Meals, the more the beauty of this idea captured Ruth and me. The board and all those involved in Scottish International Relief back home were immediately supportive of the proposal to start this new campaign. We decided to set up a branch of Scottish International Relief in Malawi to begin this work there (as well as the various other projects we were by now committed to in that country). Gay Russell did a huge amount of work to get the organization set up in the right way, roping in a friend in Blantyre who was a lawyer, and before long she joined Tony Smith and me as the first Trustees of the new Malawi organization. Meanwhile we began fund-raising for our new Mary’s Meals campaign.

  We all agreed that the vision of Mary’s Meals should be for every child to receive a daily meal in their place of education. Clearly there was a lot of work ahead of us. We just had to decide where to begin.

  7

  One Cup of Porridge

  Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.

  MOTHER TERESA

  At the foot of Michuru Mountain (on which the cross was being built) lay an impoverished township called Chilomoni, clustered along a road that curled out of Blantyre flanked by fruit sellers, barbers, mechanics and a myriad of other small businesses that plied their trade out of little stalls. Rows of tiny houses marched up the hillside behind them, homes to a growing population. In the middle of this settlement sat a large parish church and school.

  Two hours north, on a plain beside the Shire River, in the rain shadow of a ridge of hills, lay the remote area of Chipini, reached only by long, rough, dusty tracks. A scatter of tiny villages of mud brick and thatch were surrounded by little fields of maize that often did not grow well. Amid these villages was a clinic run by some nuns, the Medical Missionaries of Mary, with whom we had worked to provide emergency food supplies during the famine.

  These two spots presented themselves as good places to begin Mary’s Meals. Gay knew people in Chilomoni through the work she was doing to organize the construction of the cross and because the girls from Craig Lodge had spent some weeks there, living in a rented small house which she had arranged for them. Their time there had given us further insight into the plight of orphans in that community and they had drawn up lists of those in greatest need. Gay began talking to the people there to understand their situation and to introduce them to the concept. They expressed a huge desire for Mary’s Meals, and together with the community leaders she began planning for these to be introduced to the small primary school beside the parish church. Before long they had built a simple little kitchen and store in readiness for the project to begin.

  From the outset we were convinced that Mary’s Meals could only be effective and long-lasting, if the local community ‘owned it’. We felt strongly that each school community needed to believe in this project and have a desire to support it at least as much as us. We wanted to avoid, at all costs, the mistake of imposing an idea on people; rather, we wanted it to be theirs more than ours. This would require a genuine respectful partnership in which the local community would give what they could to enable the provision of daily meals to their children, while we would support by providing the food and other required assistance that they were unable to afford. Specifically, this concept would depend on local volunteers making a commitment to organize and carry out the daily work of cooking and serving the food. We were determined to ensure this was not seen as another emergency feeding project, but a very specific, community-owned intervention aimed at schoolchildren and linked always to education. At Chilomoni, it became clear that the Parent Teachers’ Association (PTA) was the appropriate local body through which to organize. Following some community meetings at which a huge desire and enthusiasm for the Mary’s Meals project was amply demonstrated, the PTA agreed to take responsibility for organizing a rota of parents and grandparents who would take their turn in giving up a morning to prepare the meals.

  Another thing we felt very strongly about was that, whenever possible, the food we provided should be locally grown rather than imported. We wanted to support the economy of the country and the local farmers at every opportunity. In Malawi there was an extremely popular porridge for children called Likuni Phala (‘Likuni’ being the name of the place where the dish had been carefully formulated for growing children by some pioneering nuns several years earlier, while ‘Phala’ simply means porridge). It consists of maize, soya and sugar, and is fortified with vitamins and minerals. It has become the dish of choice for Malawian children and their families. Gay knew a company who manufactured Likuni Phala, by buying the raw ingredients from smallholder farmers all over Malawi and processing them into a ready-mix that simply required cooking in boiling water before serving. The choice of this, as the food we could buy and serve, was a very straightforward one. The ingredients – aside from some of the added vitamins, which came from South Africa – were all grown within Malawi and the product was readily available, easy to transport and simple to cook. It was also wonderfully inexpensive!

  During January 2003, the first Mary’s Meals were cooked and served at Chilomoni. That same week exactly the same thing was happening for the first time in those remote and hungry villages in Chipini. There, the impressive Medical Missionaries of Mary sisters had organized the school feeding programme, based on exactly the same model of local volunteers cooking Likuni Phala, for seven small primary schools. The rates of child malnutrition were particularly high there, and many children did not attend school because of hunger and poverty. And so it was that Mary’s Meals began in an urban and rural setting simultaneously.

  My first visit to Chipini after the start of Mary’s Meals was, sadly, during another famine, for in 2003 food shortages here were more acute than ever. At Chinyazi primary school, skinny children queued quietly for their Mary’s Meals. Far too quietly. Many of the children walked past me, the white man with the camera, as if I wasn’t there: none of the usual laughing and jostling to get in the picture. It was already noon and they were more interested in eating for the first time that day. Little groups of children sat down in the dust and silently ate their porridge. For most of them this would be their only meal of the day. Near the school, outside a mud hut, I saw a ‘gogo’ (grandmother) sitting with her youngest grandchildren and I paid her a visit. She explained that her daughter, the children’s mother, had died and that she was the children’s sole carer. She told me in despairing tones that there was now no maize she c
ould afford to buy in this whole area. Later on, her two older grandchildren, Allieta and Kondwande, arrived back from school carrying their grubby jotters and empty mugs (in which they had been served their Mary’s Meals). They had more energy now. They laughed when they saw me at their home and proudly showed Granny their schoolwork. They explained that the daily porridge was enabling them to attend school for the first time.

  Within a few months of serving Mary’s Meals a few things became obvious. First of all it was plain to see that this was not just a nice idea. It was something that would actually work. The schools began to report that, after the introduction of the daily meals, children whose attendance rates had previously been very poor, because of illness and hunger, were now attending every day. They also began to see significant increases in enrolment. Children who had never been to school were coming for the first time, sent by parents who were assured their children would now eat every day and were therefore happy to give up the help they might have been providing in the fields and at home.