The Shed That Fed a Million Children

by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow

  In nearby Vagra, the children were being taught under a huge old tree in the centre of the village. Two water buffalo were looking at the scene with interest, and while I chatted to the teacher one of his pupils put up his hand to inform us politely that a goat was eating the alphabet chart behind us. The conditions were not ideal for teaching, but the teacher was delighted with the progress that his thirty-one Hindu pupils were making.

  The light was fading fast by the time Father Joson and I arrived at Kear Colony, a small slum on the edge of Karnal, two hours north of Delhi. Nineteen families lived there in makeshift tarpaulin and plastic tents erected among enormous piles of rubbish. Outside some tents people were brewing their evening meals on cow-dung fires, while in a space behind the tents a few boys were playing cricket. In the shadow of a high brick wall two elderly women sifted methodically through shreds of paper, plastic bottles and an endless variety of other refuse, patiently placing in piles the items they could sell. Everyone in this community played a part in this recycling process on which their survival depended. As I watched, two men arrived on their rickshaws (three-wheel pedal carts) on which were tied huge sacks of unsorted rubbish. This they had gathered from the streets and bins around Karnal and it was added to the piles to be sorted through.

  A family invited us to sit with them outside one of their tents to share their Chai (sweet milky tea) and to hear their story. They had left their homes in Chattishaghar, a state 700 miles to the south-east, about twenty years previously when drought and lack of paid work had forced them to move in order to survive. All of the men spent each day on rickshaws collecting rubbish, but they explained that none of them had ever saved enough to buy their own (a rickshaw cost about £60); instead they had to hire them on a daily basis. On a bad day the value of the rubbish they collected did not even cover the cost of the hire, and then they also had to pay the local landowner for the right to pitch their tents there. Each day was a desperate struggle for survival and none of the fifty-five children in Kear Colony ever attended school. We discussed the idea of setting up an outdoor school there and providing Mary’s Meals so that their children could attend. There was much delight at the idea. It was now quite dark and they refilled our cups. A young man held a little home-made kerosene lamp beside me so that I could write notes as together we formed a plan, while a huge orange sun began to set behind the mounds of rubbish where the two women continued to work.

  Finally, we visited Somalaka, where we had opened one of the first of these ‘non-formal’ schools five years previously. Here most of the children were Sikhs, belonging to a caste that made and repaired keys. No one here had even thought of school as a possibility before the centre opened. The children, wearing turbans, sat peacefully in rows, and the difference in their behaviour and that of the more rowdy children in the new centres I had just visited was marked. Lunch was a little late and while we waited Father Joson asked them if they would be upset if the food did not come. A little boy thought about for it for a moment before he said solemnly, ‘No, not upset. But we will be hungry.’

  Before we left, the teacher told us astonishing news. She explained that of the forty children they had begun teaching here five years ago, twenty-five had now moved on into formal education. Five of those children, now teenage girls, had come back to the centre today and, after helping to serve the food to the younger children, they sang us a song which offered us a ‘hearty welcome’ and told us that in their hearts they had ‘love like a mountain and peace like a river’.

  More than ever, the startling power of one daily meal served in a place of education became evident in those oppressed communities in India, where previously people had not even dared hope their children could go to school.

  And so we went on, meeting all sorts of communities in all sorts of countries, to discuss the possibility of them serving Mary’s Meals to their impoverished children. We began to work with the semi-nomadic Turkana people in the desert lands of northern Kenya, in a landscape that overwhelmed me with its terrifying scale and remote beauty, among a people whose lives depended upon their herds of cattle, goats, donkeys and camels. Endemic malnutrition was a feature of Turkana life. A government survey just before my first visit revealed that of every 1,000 babies born in Turkana, 159 died almost immediately. In little thatched nurseries, malnourished young children began to eat daily meals, served by women whose necks were stretched by colourful beads. Climate change here was making their traditional way of life unsustainable and many Turkana needed to find a new way to live and support their families. The education of their children – starting with the youngest – was becoming more important than ever.

  Meanwhile, 400 miles further south in Kenya, we began serving meals in sprawling urban slums around Nairobi and Eldoret, where many children who previously lived on the streets and sniffed glue to stave off the pain of hunger began to come to school, drawn in by the promise of a good meal.

  And in neighbouring Uganda we also began to meet children enduring a very specific and acute suffering. Here we were providing meals for children who had been forced to flee the atrocities of Joseph Kony’s infamous Lord’s Resistance Army. One evening, in 2005, I visited some of those children who had become ‘night commuters’, in a place called Layibi, on the edge of Gulu. We arrived after dark and our headlights shone on the gates of a church compound, which swung open as we approached. Inside a tiny courtyard they sat huddled in tight rows; hundreds of small children and a few adults. They stared at us in curious silence, blankets draped around their shoulders. Some of the smallest children were already asleep, curled up beside their older brothers and sisters. We had some whispered conversations and then, a little later, before they entered the security of the church for the night, the people prayed together and sang a song to Our Lady. Their quiet harmonies rose unexpectedly through the silent evening like wind rustling through trees. Then the older children shook their younger siblings awake and helped them with their blankets and rolled mats into the church. Inside they lay down in rows beside the pews that had been stacked to one side. These children were among 40,000 ‘night commuters’ who, every evening, left their homes to seek security in the centre of towns such as Gulu. To stay at home would have meant running the very real risk of abduction by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Over 1.4 million people had been forced to flee their homes and were living in terrible conditions in huge displaced camps. Many of those people were now heading south to Kampala to start a new life away from this terror in a place where their children could go to school – and in some of those schools we were now providing Mary’s Meals.

  The next day, in Kampala, I visited a place called Kireka on the edge of the capital city. Here, men, women and children spent their days quarrying gravel to survive. From a cleft in the rock on the steep hillside, black smoke billowed upwards. Men hammered out large chunks of the scorched stone and carried them in adapted plastic jerrycans to hundreds of women and children sitting on the slopes below. With little home-made hammers – pieces of lead attached to a rough stick – they spent their days smashing the lumps of rock into small pieces. From all over the hill came the sound of lead cracking against rock, while way above, from a little church clinging to the top of the highest cliff, the sound of a choir practising their hymns floated over us. I approached a group of young mothers and their children, who sat hammering among piles of dusty rocks. When I said hello, they invited me to try breaking the rock. I began hammering as I talked to them and felt the sharp splinters in my face, and wondered how they could possibly do this all day without losing their sight. They told me they were nearly all Acholi from the north – but some of them were Sudanese refugees. They were paid three pence for each small jerrycan of gravel, and they produced about eighty of these in a week. Most of their children now attended the nearby primary school, where we had just begun providing Mary’s Meals, and so at least received one good meal every day. There were less children working here now, but there were still far too many, lik
e the three orphans they pointed out to me, who worked nearby beside their elderly grandmother in the shadow of an overhanging cliff. One of the women, called Stella, told me how she had very nearly been killed recently. She had been trapped under a rock fall and screamed until other workers rushed to pull her out. Seconds after they had freed her, a huge rock, ‘the size of a bus’, fell from the cliff above, landing exactly where she had been. But all of them agreed that even this was better than life in camps. And then they laughed as they noticed a speck of blood on my finger and made jokes about my soft white hands as they took the hammer back from me before I did any further damage.

  ‘Life here is very hard,’ said Stella, becoming serious again, ‘but at least now we can try to provide for ourselves instead of surviving on handouts in the camps.’

  That was one of the more common misconceptions or prejudices that I encountered while fund-raising; that progress in Africa was not being made because there was a handout culture and that people preferred to do nothing and wait for aid. In my own experience that was very rarely the case. I have not met, anywhere, more hard-working people than some of the farmers I spent time with in Liberia, or those working all day in Delhi for pitiful pay in order to feed their families, or those like Stella working in that quarry to survive. And most of them had a burning desire to be free from dependence on aid. That is why those parents I met living in poverty almost invariably craved for their children to be educated, for they knew, ultimately, that was how their children could become independent, and they were willing to make extraordinary sacrifices for that to be possible.

  And who knows when any of us, however hard-working, might be in need of some aid. Certainly there were many living on the southern coasts of India, Sri Lanka and Indonesia who had never before required aid until, during a few awful moments on Boxing Day 2005, their lives were ruined. In the early hours of that morning, off the west coast of Sumatra, beneath the ocean floor, the Indian Plate was subducted by the Burma Plate, triggering the third-largest earthquake ever recorded. The series of tsunami waves that were produced killed over 230,000 people in fourteen countries around the Indian Ocean. It was one of the worst natural disasters ever, and even before that scale could be fully understood, the world was stunned by the news woken up to that Boxing Day morning. Later that day, Father Joson phoned me to explain that the Tamil Nadu coastline of south-east India had been devastated and that he and his co-workers were trying to provide immediate emergency aid – indeed some of his colleagues living near the affected areas had already started helping. He pleaded for Mary’s Meals to raise funds and for me to travel to join them and help plan a response. My first reactions were selfish. I had been desperately looking forward to my Christmas break with my family as I had been travelling a lot, and initially, I said to Julie, I felt it would not be fair for me to go. She felt strongly otherwise, saying that I should be with our friends in India, and that I should make a quick visit there immediately so we could launch a public appeal for help with a concrete action plan that could be supported. Ever since Julie and I had taken emergency aid to Bosnia-Herzegovina during the war, we had been cautious about rushing to get involved in every emergency reported by the news. We had seen in that situation, and others since, that some charitable organizations used such events to fly their flag and raise a lot of money, without necessarily being the best placed to work in the given area or being well-equipped to meet the specific needs. So we had formed a policy, whereby we would only respond and launch an emergency appeal if we were already working in the country where the disaster took place and believed we had the ability to deliver a well-designed, focused response. If not, we would suggest that people donated to other, better-placed organizations. On this occasion, because our partners in India, PSSS, were already in the area and had years of experience of working in those communities, we were convinced we should act.

  So it was that a few days after the deadly wave had struck, I once again found myself travelling with Father Joson, this time southwards from Chennai towards some villages on the Tamil Nadu coastline.

  The little fishing village of Arriyanattu, on the edge of Nagapattinam, must have once looked like a picture postcard. With its thatched cottages amid palm trees on the edge of a sandy beach dotted with colourful fishing boats, it had all the ingredients. In the space of a few awful hours, that idyllic image had been chewed up and spat out by an enormous wave that roared out of the glistening sea without warning. When we arrived nothing was how it should have been, or where it should have been. At the top of the beach, in a sandy space where the railway station used to be, a large wooden fishing boat lay beside the track. The row of cottages nearest the sea had been replaced by a pulverized mess of smashed boats, bricks, plastic cups, outboard engines, fishing nets, school bags, books, tree stumps and human remains. The stench that had begun to invade our nostrils even a few miles inland, as we approached the village, was now almost unbearable. Amid this wreckage, a young man sat crying on the concrete foundation of his home; all that was left of his house. We began speaking to him. His name was Kennedy Raj and he told us he had lost his father and they had not yet found his body.

  Behind him a team of volunteers, wearing masks over their noses and mouths, were working to clear up the mess and recover the bodies. They were using their JCB cautiously. Already that morning they had found 100 bodies. As the remains of a young woman were lifted from beneath a squashed house, her brother, Thennarson, and his wife, Malathi, sat nearby crying quietly. For them, though, the horror had only just begun. Within the next hour the bodies of their two dead children were found. As the volunteers covered their remains in white disinfectant powder and carried them out on a stretcher, Malathi became hysterical. She screamed at the sea and the sky, and began to hit herself until she fell sobbing on the beach. She was joined by other mothers who held each other and, in turn, clawed at the sand and screamed as their loved ones were placed beside a huge hole that the JCB had dug in the beach, which would become their final resting place. Here and there, amid the carnage, people sat on the places where their homes used to be and stared at the ocean. Three young boys perched on a fallen tree, with scarves pressed across their mouths and noses, watched with fascination and horror as the JCB worked its way through the wreckage of their village.

  We found most of the survivors from Ariyanatta a few miles away in a Hindu temple called Nilathachi Amman. When they had fled the village they ran there and had since slept in the courtyard enclosed by the temple walls. Washing lines were strung between ancient, ornate pillars, round which peeked little smiling children, apparently oblivious to the horror through which they had just lived. As the late-afternoon sun dipped behind the walls, a few boys played cricket in a dusty corner, while three women sat huddled together on some stone steps. They were three generations of the same family and the younger two had both lost children to the tsunami. They began to tell me about living conditions there in the temple, explaining they desperately needed powdered milk for some of the babies. Suddenly the grandmother screamed and began crying. The other two held her tight and together they rocked back and forth, sobbing.

  ‘If the government had given us some warning this wouldn’t have happened!’ said a woman beside them. She pointed up at the thirty-foot-high temple wall, saying, ‘The wave was that height.’

  A group of children gathered round and began to tell us their escape stories. Some had climbed swaying palm trees and clung there until the water had subsided. A little girl told me she was watching television when she heard this funny noise and saw water appearing. She ran as fast as she could and just managed to escape.

  ‘I have lost my brother, though,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, we’ve been looking for him everywhere,’ her little friends told me.

  Beside them was a young blind man with a very small baby. They explained he had lost his wife and his two other children. His baby had been found unharmed by his neighbours, miraculously floating among the debris. I wondere
d who was left to help the blind man care for his baby.

  I asked their mothers when they might think about going back to Ariyanattu (without telling them about the horrors we had witnessed there that morning).

  ‘We are getting some food and medical care here – what have we got to go back to there? Only mud!’ answered a lady in the crowd.

  ‘We feel helpless, though,’ said another voice.

  ‘We can’t stay here sleeping outside like this, but we’ve got nothing … nothing left. All we knew was fishing, but …’ her voice trails off and she looks ashamed, ‘we’re scared to go near the sea now.’

  The next day back in Chennai I discussed with our partner organization, PSSS, about how we could best help. We decided to concentrate our efforts on that village of Ariyanattu, starting with the immediate needs of those who had lost their homes, their livelihoods and their loved ones, while we assessed how to help them recover. We provided the funds for two nuns, connected to PSSS, to live among the homeless of Naggapattinam for a few weeks. They would help the people with their day-to-day needs and carry out an assessment of how we could help them take the first steps towards recovery.

  Our planning meeting ended after 10 p.m. and Father Amil, a local priest who had been working flat out since the wave hit, announced he was off to load another lorry of rice for a coastal village. I asked him where they were buying the rice from and he explained that they weren’t buying it. He had been out on the streets with a loudspeaker, asking people to donate rice. Hundreds of people were responding and tonnes of donated rice were pouring in – even schoolchildren were turning up with cups of rice. The people of India desperately needed help from people in other countries, given the almost unprecedented scale of the disaster, but they were certainly not just waiting for Western aid to arrive. The kindness was a sign of hope that I clung to amid the horror of those few days; as was the support that began to be provided from all over the world in response to our latest appeal. This allowed us, during the next year, to provide health care and temporary shelters, and to replace fishing boats so that people here could once again venture out to sea to earn their living.