The Shed That Fed a Million Children

by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow

  As soon as we left the church we were ambushed. Father Gamba had obviously let the people of Chaoni know that their visitors were from Mary’s Meals. On a football field nearby several hundred people had gathered to welcome us. Some of them, including the paramount chief, had even travelled from the neighbouring mountain to be there. We were invited to sit on a row of chairs and were entertained by singing, dancing and tug-of-war competitions. The elders made a series of speeches and presented us with gifts. I was given a beautiful black polished staff by the chief. And then, having captivated us with their welcome, they read us a plea to bring Mary’s Meals to the community here. We learnt there were over 5,000 people living in the villages on the plateau and that their one school had 917 students. Many children were not attending school and when we looked at their records we could see that the dropout rate of students was horribly high. A class of well over a hundred children in Standard 1 had dwindled to just thirteen pupils by Standard 8. Poverty and hunger were taking their usual distressing toll on the isolated children of the mountain.

  Having learnt all this, and heard their speeches and received their gifts in front of hundreds of expectant children, it was with some awkwardness that I finally rose when invited to respond to the request they had just made us. While part of me felt a little annoyed by their carefully orchestrated ‘ambush’, which had taken me completely off-guard, I also could not help but admire their determination and planning. They clearly wanted Mary’s Meals for their children very much. After thanking them for their welcome and gifts, I told them that we had only climbed the mountain to celebrate Pentecost with them and that their request had surprised me. I explained that we had many schools on our waiting lists and for each one we went through a careful process of discussion with the community to agree a partnership. And besides, for Chaoni, we would also need to figure out how to transport the food on the steep two-hour walk from the nearest road to their school. They immediately responded by telling us that they would happily come and carry the food from a village at the bottom of the mountain, if we could only deliver it there for their children. We agreed we would return very soon for more formal meetings with their community leaders. We said our goodbyes, and with the children of the youth club, who had led us here and who were now happy that their hilltop friends might receive the Mary’s Meals, we descended the mountain.

  I felt as if I had seen two worlds collide happily that day on top of the mountain. In some ways the whole story of Mary’s Meals is a series of collisions or meetings, between individuals and communities, with ears to listen to each other. An irresistible force for good is created when disparate peoples move towards each other with a shared desire and willingness to see hungry children fed. The idea of the people of Chaoni, descending to meet us at the foot of their mountain, in order to take possession of gifts sent by people in faraway places and then carry them up steep paths in order to cook them for their children is a poignant one. And I especially loved the fact that in this case it was children who had led us up the mountain so that other children, even hungrier than them, might eat.

  It seemed that everywhere I looked a bright new young generation was now leading the way. Not far from Gay’s house is the wonderful Jacaranda School for Orphans. I first met Marie de Silva, the remarkable founder of this school at that CNN Hero event in Los Angeles (she, too, had been named a ‘top ten hero’ in a previous year). We became great friends with Marie and her husband Luc. The orphans in their school receive Mary’s Meals every day, and in return we receive much more. Here they sing gloriously and the songs they have written about Mary’s Meals, such as ‘One Cup of Porridge’ and ‘Let Us Be Educated’, make me cry whenever the children sing them to us, which is exactly what they do as soon as Calum and I arrive to say a quick hello. A few months previously we had invited two of their most gifted singers, Vanessa and Joyce, over to Scotland, where they delighted a crowd of over 1,000 people at our annual Open Day, before we travelled on to another Mary’s Meals event in a beautiful palace in Vienna where they sang in front of the Prince and Princess of Liechtenstein and many other distinguished guests. It was great to see them again, this time back in the more familiar setting of their classroom. They were still buzzing about their trip of a lifetime, and many of the kids were asking how they could help Mary’s Meals in Malawi. Incredibly, four of their former schoolmates, who have recently graduated from Jacaranda, are now paid employees of Mary’s Meals. There is something deeply gratifying about reaching the stage when we can employ staff who have themselves eaten Mary’s Meals at school.

  Recently, in Liberia, I had spent some time with Boakai, now a Mary’s Meals monitor and vital member of our team there. He amazed me by telling me that he was among the little children who queued up to eat the very first plates of Mary’s Meals served in his country. I remember that day vividly. Boakai explained that as a child he had lived with his grandmother near Massatin, the leper colony where we had chosen to serve those first Liberian Mary’s Meals, and he described walking 3 miles every day to receive the meals and attend school. After our chat I watched him climb on to his motorbike, and head off down the rough road, slaloming round the deep potholes, towards the remote schools he was due to visit and write reports on that day. Just round the corner he would pass Bomi Radio Station, where Meloshe, one of Liberia’s rising stars, works. He is the director of news at the widely listened-to regional station, and manages a team of twenty-two people. This independent radio service is fearlessly holding the government to account, with lively political phone-ins and topical debates.

  Ten years ago, Meloshe’s life had been in tatters after he was driven from his home by rebel forces during the civil war. Later with the help of Mary’s Meals he regained the chance of an education.

  ‘Mary’s Meals helped me to get where I am now,’ he proudly states.

  Many of his generation, having enjoyed Mary’s Meals, are now starting to build a new much brighter future for their countries. On my last visit to Haiti I was given an overwhelming welcome at one of the Hands Together schools in Cité Soleil. I arrived to find an entire campus bedecked in home-made posters that made statements about Mary’s Meals. On a balcony above the central courtyard three boys were leaning through the railings to attach a banner that that read, No Education without Food. Flowers adorned a doorway on which was written Welcome Magnus and Mary’s Meals. And in the kitchen a team of cooks wearing Mary’s Meals aprons were working under a huge painted sign that said Thank you Mary’s Meals.

  I was enjoying their hugely impressive and entertaining school concert, when, to my great surprise, Jimmy climbed on to the stage and took the microphone. I had first met Jimmy in 2010, a few months after the earthquake, when he was head boy of this school. I had interviewed him about his life. He impressed me hugely with his intelligence and his positive approach, despite the fact that he lived in a pitiful, tiny, broken tin home in one of the poorest parts of Cité Soleil. He had told me then about his passion to study agriculture so that he could help the people of Haiti grow more of their own food and escape dependence on aid. From the school stage he addressed us and the assembly of pupils with passion and confidence. He told us how he had received Mary’s Meals for many years.

  ‘I have figured out now that Mary’s Meals helped me physically, morally and spiritually; it gave my body strength, it made me think about sharing with others and it led me to think about the “yes” of Mary and the “yes” of all those who serve Mary’s Meals.’ For a moment his smiling swagger dropped and he became choked with emotion. As he left the stage his audience clapped loudly and roared their approval. Jimmy, who was by now working for Hands Together, was clearly popular in these parts.

  Later, after school lessons were finished for the day, I witnessed something that moved me even more deeply. At long last a special project, which had been originally planned to begin the day the earthquake struck, was up and running. The ‘barefoot children’ who live on the streets of the slum were now invited
in for a daily meal, after the end of the regular school day. Some of those children had initially arrived naked, a few weeks previously, but by now Father Tom had given them all a T-shirt and shorts. I watched as 1,353 of these little barefoot ones queued for their plates of rice, fish and beans. They devoured them in silence, before making their way, laughing and chatting, into the school classrooms where they have started to receive their first school lessons given by young volunteers, recently graduated from this same school. François is one of those who has returned to give something back. Wearing a white shirt and blue tie, he cuts a handsome animated figure as he points at the letters on the blackboard and speaks to the ragged skinny children in front of him. François knows the taste of Mary’s Meals. He knows that for him, and the children in front of him, education is their only hope – the only way out of the squalor and violence and hunger all around them. And so he happily gives up his time for these children without financial reward.

  As we finally leave the school I notice one more poster among the hundreds of carefully handwritten signs that proclaim gratitude and love for Mary’s Meals. The handwriting and the little spelling mistake suggest it has been written by one of the younger pupils, perhaps even one of the ‘barefoot kids’. It says simply: Food maks it better.

  Epilogue

  It is summer and the Orchy has grown ponderous and narrow and warm enough for my kids to swim in her. I saw them through my shed window earlier, trotting down the farm track with their towels and lunchboxes, heading for the pool at Corryghoil. For a moment I was tempted to join them but there are some things I need to do.

  Over a million children are now eating Mary’s Meals every school day in over 1,200 schools. New pictures drawn by some of them are on my wall. The extraordinary ways in which all this has grown and developed have continually surprised me and filled me with a sense of mystery and awe. It would not be true, though, to say that I never expected our work to grow so big. I have long felt that the vision of Mary’s Meals is so compelling, and people of good will so numerous, that it must be fulfilled. That is why we are celebrating this landmark as ‘The First Million’. The fact that there remain many more millions without daily meals, and that thousands die each day because of hunger, is a scandal that screams this mission of ours has only just begun.

  When we first reached a million I asked our clever team in the Glasgow office to provide me with some information about what it would take for the rest of them to eat at school. I mean all the children of primary-school age in the developing world. But it was a mistake. The spreadsheet they sent me told me that to provide Mary’s Meals to every child in Malawi, based on our current costs, would require an annual budget of £22 million. I was not able to resist typing that value into Google. I saw there was a house for sale in London with that asking price and a rare orange diamond had been recently sold for the same amount. I am not sure if orange diamonds are the sort they mine in Liberia, but the figures showed that actually we would only need a little more than half the value of that diamond to feed all of the primary-school children in that nation each year.

  I notice, too, that the annual whisky sales from Scotland are worth a similar total to the sum needed to feed all the primary-school children in the whole of Africa who are currently without meals at school. But then I close the spreadsheet, deciding that this is not a particularly good use of my time. I know already that our vision is eminently achievable. It would require the world’s governments and international bodies to devote only a tiny fraction of the resources at their disposal to make this happen and thereby transform the future of the world’s poorest nations. And it would require all of us to share only a tiny fraction of our own resources in order to make it happen too. The purchaser of that house in London is not obliged to share their bread any more than I am.

  The shed is heating up now in the midday sun and I begin writing a letter to our supporters, those who are indeed sharing what they have in generous ways. I thank them on behalf of Veronica, Boakai and Jimmy, and those other young people whose lives they have saved and transformed. I tell them about the schools currently on our waiting list (including that one on top of Chaoni Mountain). And I remind them, too, that it costs us only £12.20 to feed another child for a year. As usual, I feel the letter falls well short of what those people deserve and once again I wish each of them could meet those children, watch them eat their meals and listen to them talk of their hopes and dreams. The fact that our donors continue to share what they have without ever knowing that privilege humbles me.

  Seeking some inspiration for my letter, I head into the chapel next door at Craig Lodge. It is my favourite room in the world. The sun is streaming through the bay windows. In the far corner is a statue of Our Lady, under which sits another huge, fresh, beautiful bunch of flowers, grown, picked and arranged by my mum. A message given by Our Lady at Medjugorje many years previously pops into my mind.

  ‘Open your heart to Jesus, like a flower opens itself to the sun,’ she had once advised us.

  On the altar table (on which a snooker table of my childhood once sat) is a roughly carved wooden crucifix. I remember the dark, frightening evening when it was given to me by Father Tom and his friends as we huddled praying in the rubble of his courtyard after the earthquake. They had salvaged it that day from the remains of the house where their friends had died, and they each in turn held it and prayed on it before giving it to me as a gift, a way for us to stay in solidarity with each other on my return home.

  I am sitting beside the old fireplace and it triggers another memory, this time of my brother Mark when he was seven years old. It was Christmas Day, not long after we fostered him, and this was still our living room and the open fire still our main source of warmth. Our presents were piled high under a Christmas tree, and before we could open them Mum and Dad insisted that we all convince Mark that Santa Claus had come down the chimney in the night – having previously scattered some of the logs stacked beside the fire to prove it. I had been a little surprised because the rest of us had never been brought up to believe in Santa, but I greatly admired their efforts to ensure Mark was not disappointed on his first Christmas with us.

  I think Mark is in heaven now. He feels like my big brother now, even though he was five years younger than me. He died at thirty-nine years old, two years ago, in Medjugorje. I had found him, after two days of searching with Milona, Charlie and other dear friends, in a beautiful little secluded field full of fragrant flowers. He had been praying prostrate when he died (probably of a heart attack), his shoes placed neatly beside him. In a carrier bag beside him was the food he was carrying back to our guest house – a little treat intended for my son, Ben. Mark had been ill and in terrible pain for most of his adult life. One day when I was driving him to a hospital appointment, he told me that he understood that prayer was the part he could play in the mission, and that he had developed a deep belief that when he offered his suffering up it had meaning and power. We made a cross of stones in the field where he had lain. It is a wonderful spot to sit when the sun is going down, just as it was when he died, and to watch the lengthening shadows cast by the trees that line the old stone wall. From there you can see the church’s twin spires and Krizevac across the vineyards. Mark left this life magnificently.

  As I pray now in the chapel, I feel an overwhelming sense of gratitude; to Mark, for all he shared with me and taught me, to Mum and Dad for inviting him, a stranger then, into our family and to God for taking him home the way He did. And I thank God once again for giving us this work to do for His little ones. I ask Him to teach us how to share the bread that belongs to all. I ask Him to clothe this work always in His love and to help us remember that this work is not ours, but His, and I pray that He might move many more people to take part in this mission so that all those hungry children might soon be fed.

  And then I decide to leave the writing of that letter until another day, and while there is still time, I head up the river to swim with my children.r />
  Picture Section

  Emma and her children, including Edward, sitting at the back on Emma’s left, November 2002. (Chris Furlong)

  Magnus, Fergus, Ruth, Ken and cousins at an apparition with the visionaries in Medjugorje, 1983.

  Winter view from the shed window.

  Julie and Magnus consult their map enroute to Bosnia-Herzegovina, 1993.

  Magnus visiting a school in Blantyre, Malawi. (Heathcliff O’Malley)

  Another container of aid from Scotland received by Father Garry Jenkins in Liberia, 2000. (Colin Mearns)

  A child in Cité Soleil, Haiti, 2006. (Angela Caitlin)

  In a village school, Liberia 2014. (Colin Mearns)

  Servings for preschool age children in Blantyre.