It also became apparent that there was an enormous and pressing demand for Mary’s Meals. As soon as other villages and communities learnt of Mary’s Meals they requested we consider them as part of the programme. However we also learnt very quickly that the magnetism of these meals was so powerful it could also cause a problem. While, from the outset, we had wanted the daily meals to draw children into school, we had not realized that they would be so attractive as to prompt children to leave neighbouring schools and enrol in those where the daily meals were being served, even if this meant a daily walk of several miles. This migration of pupils was not what we had intended and the requests of those villages from where children were now walking became all the more difficult to refuse.
Our efforts to fund-raise and increase awareness became even more determined and certainly more focused. It seemed we were developing a replicable model that could save and change lives and transform the future of the world’s poorest communities. We wanted to tell the whole world! Given our low-cost fund-raising model based on the activities of volunteers, and communication mainly by ‘word of mouth’, we knew that this would not happen overnight, but we did start to see that presenting Mary’s Meals to people was igniting unprecedented support. I enjoyed greatly the opportunity to explain to people the concept and how it worked. Faces would light up at the understanding that something as simple as a daily meal in school could meet the immediate need of the hungry child and at the same time tackle the underlying cause of poverty. People warmed to this simple solution. And their enthusiasm grew greater still when they learnt that to feed a child for a whole school year cost only £5! A few, understandably, needed some convincing that this could possibly be a true cost and we were happy to explain this. It was indeed a real number made possible mainly because nearly all the work was done by unpaid volunteers, and because the food we bought in bulk was locally grown and remarkably cheap. By now I no longer felt daunted at speaking in public – at least not if I was talking about Mary’s Meals. In fact no audience ever seemed too large or too small, I just felt grateful for every chance to tell people the good news. I noticed that the story of Mary’s Meals tended to put smiles on faces and not only prompted immediate donations, but often left others feeling equally evangelical about this mission. Before long their friends became supporters too, and so it went on. Our database began to grow faster than ever and so did our income.
While we were not able to say yes immediately to all those many requests for Mary’s Meals, we were delighted we could now plan for expansions. To combat migration of children from other schools, we decided to cover entire districts by working outwards from existing schools to the neighbouring ones. If we had realized the need for this approach we might not have begun serving meals in two different areas from the outset, although in many ways it was a good thing to have begun in schools both on the edge of Malawi’s largest city and in remote villages. It gave us an opportunity to start learning about those very different urban and rural environments. As we began to move into new schools we gradually refined the procedures and model. The first part of the process, at each new school, was to meet with the community and school leaders and to ensure their desire and commitment to take responsibility for the daily work. Then we would commit to building a kitchen and storeroom on land near the school that we then donated to the community for their own use. So at times when they were not cooking in the kitchen, that part of the building became a little community centre or, sometimes, in the afternoons of the rainy season, an additional classroom. As time went by we spotted an opportunity for further community contributions towards the building of these. In most villages, people made their own clay bricks and so we stopped buying these from suppliers and asked the community to donate them. We also began to ask the men of the village if they would labour beside the qualified builders to keep costs down and speed up completion. Given that most of the volunteer cooks were mothers and grandmothers, this was also a good way to encourage more men to become involved.
During this first set-up stage, we were reliant on advice from a remarkable Malawian called Peter Nkata. He was a local businessman who knew the Russells; David through the Rotary Club and Gay through the church. When I was introduced to him, Peter, in his spare time, was working very closely with Sister Lilia, the Filipina nun we had learnt so much from, who ran the U6 centres for orphans in Blantyre. David introduced me to Peter just as Mary’s Meals began, as he knew Peter was desperately looking for funding to keep these centres running. Over dinner at Gay’s house, Peter explained that the number of children below school age in desperate need was growing rapidly. The numbers of orphans were increasing and many were now living in ‘child-headed’ families without adult support. For these children the day centres were the difference between life and death, a place where they were guaranteed a daily meal. We knew this was the most crucial time of development for the growing child and that stunting caused by malnutrition at this stage could not be reversed later. I remembered very well visiting these centres the previous year with Sister Lilia and being incredibly moved by the sweet way the little children introduced themselves. It didn’t take very long for Peter to convince us to take on the funding of the nineteen centres. So from almost the beginning of Mary’s Meals we were providing daily meals in nurseries as well as schools. After all, the basic principle was the same – a daily meal in a place of education – only the children were younger.
Peter with his local knowledge and entrepreneurial approach began to help us enormously with his advice and very quickly we asked him to become our first Country Director. We were delighted when he accepted and immediately began to build the organization that we now required by recruiting a team of staff, securing office space, establishing processes and procedures and agreements with various suppliers. The monitors became crucial members of the growing team. They were responsible for visiting the schools on a regular basis, at least twice a week. They would check the food stock, ensuring it was hygienically and securely stored and that the correct quantity was being held between the monthly deliveries. In a country where so many were hungry and corruption was endemic, protection of food stocks was a high priority for us. We soon learnt that in addition to our monitoring, the self-policing nature of this locally owned model was just as important. Most of the volunteers were mothers who would not take it lightly if someone attempted to misappropriate food that belonged to their own children. While visiting the schools the monitors also collected data on enrolment, attendance and academic performance, to begin building up a body of evidence around the impact of daily school meals.
Their other job was to check with the head teachers and PTA that sufficient volunteers were giving their support to ensure the meals were cooked in a timely manner. But we were determined not to get closely involved in management of these volunteers. On the two or three occasions when it was found that insufficient volunteers were turning up we suspended the programme. In each case, within two weeks the community leaders, who had agreed at the outset that this was their responsibility not ours, turned up at our office to explain they had solved the problem – normally a local feud – and promised the programme could resume normally, which it invariably did. And these problems were extremely rare. The spirit of these volunteers, often hungry themselves and facing a daily struggle to survive, humbled me. They would rise before dawn to light the fires on which to cook the porridge and while they stirred those enormous pots they would often sing. Teresa was one of them. I spoke to her one day as she was stirring a huge pot of porridge.
‘The situation is critical in this area. The food these children receive changes their lives,’ she said to me earnestly.
‘It must be a big sacrifice, though, for you to do this every day. How can you do it?’ I asked her.
‘Well, every morning before I come here, I make doughnuts, and send them to be sold at market. That is how I support myself and my daughter – and my sister’s kids too. So it is OK for me to come here. I enjo
y it!’ she said, beaming, as if it were the simplest and easiest thing in the world, to give up every day to do this unpaid work while struggling to support her own extended family.
A few years later, we carried out a survey among the tens of thousands of volunteers who by then were volunteering to cook and serve Mary’s Meals in Malawi, in order to understand better what motivated them.
‘Why do you volunteer your time?’ was the direct question we posed.
‘Because we have it in our hearts!’ one lady responded, and with that perfect answer she rendered the rest of that survey obsolete and became a spokesperson for all of us involved in this mission.
By 2005, visits to schools that were benefiting from Mary’s Meals became exciting occasions. At Goleka primary school Mr Sapuwa, the headmaster, met us with a huge smile and ushered us into his little office. His school had been receiving Mary’s Meals for a year now and he was eager to tell us about the results. He pointed to the charts on his wall.
‘Our school roll has increased from 1,790 pupils to 1,926,’ he said, ‘and the government has now provided three extra teachers! Attendance rates are now at very high levels, far better than before. In all the schools nearby where children don’t get Mary’s Meals the absentee levels are still terrible.’
But it was the next statistic that seemed to give him most joy.
‘Based on exam results this year forty-three of our pupils have been offered government-funded places in secondary schools,’ he beamed. ‘Prior to the introduction of Mary’s Meals not one of my pupils had been offered one of these places.’
While primary schooling in Malawi is free and theoretically universal, only a tiny amount of secondary-school places are available. Apart from the small number of fee-paying pupils at private schools, the others who have this opportunity are those who are provided free places based on outstanding results at their final primary-school exam. It was hard to believe such a dramatic change in academic performance could have been brought about at Goleka primary school by Mary’s Meals alone, in just one year, and we suspected there may have been some other factors at play. However, it was very clear, both here and in other schools, that children who had begun attending every day rather than just coming now and again, and who were able to concentrate rather than struggling through a whole day of class without having eaten, were going to do significantly better academically. In fact our early collections of exam results from the primary schools which benefited, before and after Mary’s Meals, showed an average increase in pass rates of 9 per cent.
Outside Mr Sapuwa’s office, there was an eruption of happy sound and we emerged to see hundreds of laughing children queuing for their morning meal. Each was holding a colourful mug. By now, we had decided to issue one of these to each pupil to ensure fair helpings for all. A row of volunteer cooks served the children from enormous pots. One of them, Esther, told me she had four children of her own at the school and so was happy to give up a morning every couple of weeks to take her turn to cook.
‘Now they are only ever hungry at weekends,’ she said as she ladled out a serving into the next child’s mug. ‘Please don’t ever stop these Mary’s Meals!’
Two older boys in the queue proudly produced a little notice they had written for my benefit. They held it up with serious faces. It read Thank you for giving us polidge. They smiled broadly when I took their photograph. Then the local chief arrived to add his thanks. He told us Mary’s Meals was helping the whole of his community.
By now this scene was being repeated in many schools across Blantyre with the same results. In some cases the increased enrolment was proving too much for already stretched school resources. At Namame primary school, within a few months of Mary’s Meals beginning, the school roll doubled from 2,000 to 4,000, a number far too great for the school to cope with. Again, it seemed a large number of the children had migrated from schools not yet receiving Mary’s Meals, and plans were already under way to provide Mary’s Meals in those so that the school roll at Namame could be reduced to a sustainable level. We also saw in time that at some schools where Mary’s Meals prompted a huge increase in enrolment that the government prioritized these for the building of new classrooms and additional teachers.
Mary’s Meals rapidly became well known in Malawi. There was a huge sense of momentum and infectious excitement. Every week we received more requests to bring Mary’s Meals to new schools. We were ready to expand rapidly if new funding could be found. Ruth and I talked incessantly about finding new ways to spread the word to all those who would want to support this work if they only knew about it.
But already more and more people were learning about and supporting our work, and doors were opening in extraordinary ways. Often these new connections and opportunities originated at Craig Lodge House of Prayer or through Medjugorje. Millions of people from all over the world had by now visited that little village in the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina and had life-changing experiences there. They comprised an enormous global network of people who, if they learnt of it, very often felt deeply moved to support this work that they perceived as a fruit of Medjugorje and another way they could express charity in their lives.
For some years, a regular visitor to the Craig Lodge House of Prayer was Milona von Habsburg. She was an Archduchess of the famous Habsburg royal family who had sat on the thrones of Europe for centuries, most notably those of the Austrian Hungarian Empire. But Milona most certainly did not live ‘like royalty’. She was another whose life had been profoundly changed at Medjugorje. She had visited there in the early 1980s and had become friends with the visionaries. Her fluency in seven European languages was a wonderful gift to the visionaries and priests just as they were becoming overwhelmed with pilgrims from every corner of the globe. Milona started working as secretary to a priest there called Father Slavko (who became well known as a speaker and author of books about the phenomena in Medjugorje), as well as a translator and close friend of the visionaries. She stayed with them in Medjugorje during the darkest days of the Bosnian war and also began travelling to many parts of the world with them as they were invited to speak and lead retreats. To our delight, on several occasions invitations for them to visit the Craig Lodge House of Prayer were accepted, and a crowd would gather in a marquee erected for the occasion in the garden.
Milona became a much-loved and recognized person in Medjugorje. She was someone who not only spoke about the messages given by Our Lady, but a person who had actually put them into daily practice in her life. She became a dear friend of our family and, after Father Slavko died in 2000, we continued inviting her to the House of Prayer to lead retreats on her own rather than translating the words of the parish priest, because we felt she had a wonderful way of talking about Our Lady’s presence in Medjugorje and explaining the messages.
On one occasion Ruth and I had just returned from Malawi and I was asked to give a little talk at the retreat that Milona and a friend were leading. I spoke about Malawi and the birth of Mary’s Meals, and showed a PowerPoint presentation I had put together. It comprised photographs of our work with quotes from people like Mother Teresa, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and a haunting soundtrack provided by one of my favourite Scottish fiddle players. Afterwards, Milona asked me for a chat. She told me that when she was listening and watching the presentation she felt a call, as strong as the one she had first received at Medjugorje, to give her life to help the work of Mary’s Meals. She asked me what she could do to help. I was overwhelmed yet again by God’s abundant providence. If God had asked me to pick anyone in the world to help us spread the good news about Mary’s Meals it would have been Milona. Very soon she was working for Mary’s Meals as an ambassador, giving talks and introducing us to lots of wonderful people with huge hearts. Many of these were people she knew through Medjugorje; others were her relatives who became marvellous supporters of our work. Notable among these were the Prince and Princess of Liechtenstein. They invited me to meet them with Milona at their castle
in Liechtenstein. I felt like a character in a James Bond spy film the first time I drove the steep, winding road through the Alps towards their ancient castle, perched on a rock overlooking the city of Vaduz, and passed over a drawbridge into their little courtyard surrounded by enormous, thick stone walls. The Prince and Princess greeted me with enormous warmth, setting my nerves at ease, and I thoroughly enjoyed my time with them, telling them about our work and answering their sincere, thoughtful questions. They became wonderful faithful supporters of our projects, spreading the word and hosting some spectacular events. The following year the Princess invited me back to speak to the Red Cross in Liechtenstein, as she was their patron and they had been fund-raising for our work. I mentioned that the date on which she wanted me to visit was our wedding anniversary and she immediately asked me to take Julie too! And so, along with Milona and her husband Charlie, who happened to be married on the very same day as us, we enjoyed a very special anniversary in a fairy-tale castle in the Alps.
On countless occasions Milona and I travelled together to give talks and do interviews with media. I never tired of hearing her speak about Mary’s Meals and her own journey. ‘In a way it is the logical consequence of a long search for the truth, the beauty of man and his value,’ she once replied when asked about why she did this work.
‘When Magnus showed one of the very first PowerPoint presentations about his work to a group of us on 26 September 2004, I met children. I did not meet an organization with high-achieving, successful, titled employees and directors. I saw children’s faces and quotes of love, respect and service to these little ones. During that presentation, the children came out of their anonymity, and turned into the brothers and sisters I needed to commit to with all my life. It just became simple and obvious! I cannot describe that moment in other words than a calling.’
The Shed That Fed a Million Children Page 13