6
It is love that asks, that seeks, that knocks, that finds, and that is faithful to what it finds.
ST AUGUSTINE
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.
We left the people of Ngwanda much later than planned. The sun had already set as we followed the truck, now half full, further on round Nkhoma Mountain to a more remote village at the very end of the road. We felt guilty as we knew the people of Mgonzo had been waiting for us all day. When we finally arrived, the light of a full moon was casting shadows between the little cluster of homes set on the side of a steep hill. Here we were met with whispered greetings. These people were even more hungry and certainly much weaker. They explained to us that they had been eating leaves, roots and unripe bananas during the previous few weeks. In some ways the quiet, almost speechless, thanks of these people was more moving than the demonstrative lively welcome that we had received earlier that day. For several minutes after unloading we sat beside the dark pile of food in complete silence – a profound and grateful silence that I will never forget – and it was with reluctance that we eventually got up to take our leave. The peaceful villagers whispered their farewells and, after whispering our promises to return, we left them sitting again in silence beside glowing fires.
The next day Ruth and I boarded a crowded bus from Lilongwe to Blantyre. The views on the four-hour journey were exhilarating, and at one high point on the road we thought we could see Lake Malawi sparkling in the far distance and what we presumed were the faint blue hills of Mozambique beyond. When the bus finally pulled over in the city centre of Blantyre we saw a white couple standing on the pavement waving at the bus. The husband, perhaps sixty years old and a little overweight, wearing unusually thick glasses, was sporting a sweatshirt with Russell Athletic emblazoned on it.
‘That must be David and Gay!’ said Ruth, pointing and laughing, as we grabbed our bags and climbed off the hot bus. We really had not known what to expect and that first impression of a man with a self-deprecating sense of humour was not, we soon discovered, misplaced. After warm hugs and a thirty-minute drive, we found ourselves in the living room of their house, perched on a hilltop with a breathtaking view across the city to the hazy plain and hills beyond. Over dinner their stories came tumbling out. We learnt that both of them had spent almost their entire lives in Africa, having grown up in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) before moving to spend their married life in Malawi, where David worked with Knight Frank and as an economic adviser to government, while Gay flew as a pilot for a large sugar corporation. We were entertained by them telling one hilarious anecdote after another. Gay also explained that after receiving Mum’s letter she had visited Medjugorje herself for the first time in 1986. After that she began helping to set up prayer groups and Medjugorje centres across Southern Africa, as well as organizing several large groups to travel from Malawi to Medjugorje on pilgrimage. In 2000, Tony Smith had contacted her and together they began to build a Way of the Cross on the edge of Blantyre, a replica of the Medjugorje one, for all those who could never travel to Europe.
‘Oh, and by the way,’ Gay said, ‘I still have that letter.’ She went out of the room and a few minutes later returned with Mum’s handwritten note. With it was a faded photograph of Ruth and me as teenagers, with the visionaries in Medjugorje, which Mum must have sent her with the letter. We laughed and cried. So did Gay. We were moved by a very deep sense of God’s plan unfolding in our lives. ‘You God botherers!’ exclaimed David. ‘A lot of stuff and nonsense!’
For the rest of that evening, and on many others, David poked fun at Gay and us, but somehow he never managed to sound truly cynical, and certainly when it came to acts of kindness and good works it soon became very apparent that he had a lot to teach the ‘God botherers’ in the room. Later, Gay told us that David had actually bought her those flights to Medjugorje as a present and insisted she went. It also seemed that half the priests and nuns in Malawi used their house as a regular place of retreat, with constant comings and goings through David’s open door. And he and Gay were also heavily involved in the famine relief effort, supporting various groups and providing a wealth of local knowledge and experience to people like us who were hoping to do something useful.
‘I hope you don’t mind, but we have a busy few days organized for you two!’ Gay told us as at last we headed, dog-tired, to our beds. ‘And we’ll make sure we take you to the top of the mountain where we are building that silly cross,’ said David.
The next few days certainly were busy. We visited various friends of Gay’s who were involved in famine relief and other good works. Among these were some young volunteers from Israel who were running a small primary health-care clinic on the shores of Lake Malawi. To get to Chembe, where they worked, we drove down an uncomfortably bumpy track and laughed at the baboons that were hanging from trees beside the road. We gasped when we finally saw the famous lake, sparkling azure blue, and a little thatched-hut village strung along the edge of a sweeping, white sandy beach. It was just like a picture from a glossy tourist magazine, complete with fishermen beside dugout canoes, mending their nets. At first glance it looked idyllic, but it wasn’t. Irit and Yogi, the two young Israeli girls, welcomed us at their clinic and gave us a hugely informative and depressing overview of life here in the lakeside community they had made their home. As we walked through the village, they explained that of 11,000 people living here already 800 were orphans – and that figure was growing rapidly. The AIDS epidemic was wiping out a huge swathe of people of childbearing age, leaving children to be cared for by their grandparents or other wider members of the family. This was a horror story unfolding across every village in Malawi, a country in which 16.4 per cent of those between fifteen and forty-nine years of age were infected – the second highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world. The numbers dying of the disease were already staggering, but now the chronic hunger that was stalking the land was making an already catastrophic situation even more terrible. The average life expectancy had plummeted to thirty-nine years and, while approximately 140 people were dying every day, it was predicted that Malawi was still some years away from its AIDS peak. As we had already learnt in Romania, a healthy diet with plenty of protein is the first most essential need for someone who is HIV-positive. And yet here, in this village, people were going three days at a time without food. A group of children gathered round us as we continued our tour, jostling for position beside us. Irit pointed out a graveyard at the back of the village, where sandy mounds stretched back to the hillside.
‘There are four or five funerals every day now,’ she told us, as an elderly man greeted her and beckoned us urgently into his courtyard. Inside his wife was lying on a mat, trying to comfort her grandchild. The thin child moaned continuously and they explained to us that his parents had died and they were now ‘mother and father’ to the child, rather than grandparents. Irit, having examined the boy, surprised us by asking if we could pay the fare for a car to take him to a proper health clinic. ‘He needs to get medicine immediately,’ she said as we handed over the pitifully small amount of money required.
Having arranged things for the couple, Irit led us on through the village. A lady carrying a very large metal bucket of water on her head stopped to chat to Irit. The bucket had a leak and the water was trickling out. As she smiled and joked with Irit, she held a small tin mug to catch the precious water trying in vain to escape from her.
Nearby we stopped at a little market where Irit bought some fish for our lunch. ‘The hunger is terrible here not just because the crops have failed, but because the lake is over fished.’ She pointed out the drying tables nearby. Some had a few small silver fish on them while many were bare. ‘These tables used to be covered with fish. They would dry them and sell them. So not only did they have fish to eat but a source of income too.’
We took the fish to Mrs Kaswaya, a friend of Irit’s who was to cook lunch for us at her home. She greeted us shyly and placed a mat on the ground for us to sit on. We sat quietly with her and ate the fish and Nsima with our hands, struggling with the heat of the food. Mrs Kaswaya and her four children giggled at us. On the way back Irit said she would like us to meet a friend of hers, Teresa, an eighteen-year-old girl who, in the face of hunger, had turned to prostitution to survive. Now she had AIDS and was dying. Irit called outside her door and eventually we heard some movement. Teresa crawled slowly out. Her stick-thin legs were no longer able to support her; Irit was as shocked as us. We sat down on the sand beside Teresa and Irit chatted to her quietly for some time. She held her hand tenderly and eventually said goodbye. She did not have anything else to give her.
We eventually left Chembe and bumped back up the rough road, past the baboons, in silence, realizing that what we had witnessed that day was a microcosm of Malawi. The battle against hunger, AIDS and degrading poverty was one being played out in every village across this land. It seemed to me that these malnourished, weakened people, deprived of the weapons of education and good health, were engaged in a horribly one-sided fight.
The itinerary put together by the Russells over the remainder of our stay gave plenty of other opportunities to learn about Malawi and to meet some of the warriors who were refusing to give up. Among such characters was a tiny, but formidably strong, nun from the Philippines, who was running day centres for children below school age in Blantyre. Most of these children were orphans and in desperate need of food and care. Her approach was to support and train local volunteers to run this project and to ensure they saw it as ‘their project and responsibility’ rather than that of some foreign organization.
‘These are your children, not mine. This is your responsibility more than it is mine,’ Sister Lilia said quite fiercely to the group of local volunteers at one of her training days, to which she had invited us. At first I was a little taken aback by her apparent lack of compassion towards these volunteers, who were, after all, giving up their time to do a very noble task in difficult circumstances. However, I soon began to understand that her philosophy was not born out of a lack of love but rather from real, genuine charity that wanted to help set these people free from reliance on aid.
Each of the twenty-one nurseries in her project was run by a management committee with members of the local community taking up the roles of office bearers. Their newfound responsibilities and the training provided often helped them find a new confidence. A recent innovation had also seen them begin to accept children from parents who could pay a fee for ‘child care’ and in this way some of the funding required to provide meals to the impoverished children was met, rather than the project relying entirely on the support of donations and grants.
I was hugely impressed by the way this project worked. I was growing increasingly uneasy about aid flown in and sometimes imposed on local communities in a way that seemed to strip people of their dignity and sense of responsibility, and that gave little thought to a future beyond such immediate intervention. Of course there was a place for emergency responses, which were at that very moment saving millions of lives in Malawi and among which our own project was playing a small part. But I had come to believe that the war against poverty and hunger here could only truly be won by the people of Malawi themselves, not by aid givers from outside, no matter how important and faithful our support for them might be.
And those U6 centres were a joy to visit! In each one we were greeted by around sixty or seventy toddlers, sitting in rows, being introduced by their volunteer teachers to numbers and letters. Whenever we arrived we would be greeted by a child who would stand and extend to us a well-rehearsed formal greeting.
‘Introduction. My name is Paul. I am four years old. I am a boy.’ And the next one would stand to repeat the formula. ‘Introduction. My name is Veronica. I am five years old. I am a girl.’ And after a number of ‘introductions’ they would sing and clap and melt our hearts.
Some of these little children were by now living in ‘child-headed families’. Orphaned, and without adult support, they were being cared for by older siblings who were sometimes primary-school age themselves. The food being provided at these centres was saving the lives of these children and the introduction to education was a gift that might just open up an escape from poverty. The centres were also a place of safety and care for these children while the elder sibling attended school or worked to survive.
On the last morning of this first visit, before heading to the airport, we rose early to climb through the woods to the top of Michuru Mountain, where they had started work on the foundations for their huge concrete cross. The view from there was breathtaking. The whole of the city of Blantyre was spread beneath us, with the vast plains and hills beyond. We prayed a rosary with Gay as we drank in the vista. When we had finished we took from our pockets some pebbles carried from our own hill in Scotland – the one behind Craig Lodge on which Dad had built ‘Stations of the Cross’ – and some from the hill in Medjugorje where the apparitions of Our Lady first took place. These we placed into the open foundations, already full of Malawian stones, and we prayed for blessing upon this project and upon Malawi. And I promised the Russells I would be back very soon.
On our return home we began fund-raising furiously. A number of those we had met in Malawi, who were carrying out such great work, were desperately in need of funding to feed more mouths and we had promised them we would do whatever we could. With Gay co-ordinating things at the Malawi end we were able immediately to begin sending funds to our new friends. We wrote about our experiences in Malawi in our own newsletters and managed to generate some media coverage.
Whenever I returned from a trip overseas I would give a little talk and show pictures to the volunteers and members of the youth community living at Craig Lodge, who had given up a year there to pray and serve those coming to stay on retreat. It was very often through the people who came to stay on retreat at Craig Lodge that our work grew, so it was important to keep the community up to date and passionate about our efforts, ensuring they could speak to those guests who were interested and wanted to learn more. Three days after this particular talk Maureen Callaghan, one of the community members, approached me to say that when I had spoken to them about Malawi, she felt a fire burning within her heart and she could not stop thinking about what she had heard and her desire to go and help. She had not slept the two nights since. She had never been anywhere in the developing world and had not previously had any particular desire to do so. Two other girls in the community – Lisa and Nicola – also felt moved in the same way. So they decided to make a ‘mission trip’ there, funded by Craig Lodge Trust (the charity set up to administer the House of Prayer). Gay was delighted to hear this news and immediately set about finding them a small house to rent at the foot of their ‘cross mountain’ in Blantyre. Here they lived for five weeks among the poorest of the poor, supporting Sister Lilia, and began to work with the local parish priest to identify children most in need of help.
Three months after my first visit, in November 2002, I returned to Malawi, this time to visit those we were by now funding and other groups that Gay knew needed help. I was accompanied this time by two journalists from the Herald, Scotland’s largest-selling quality newspaper, who had agreed to write a magazine article about the situation in Malawi and our efforts to help. By now, as predicted, the effects of the famine had worsened. Even without a famine, November often marked the start of the hungry months, but this year people had already long exhausted any reserves they might have had.
I had realized by now that most effective emergency food-distribution projects were very often being delivered by the churches, which had the advantage of a permanent structure which could be mobilized to create networks of community volunteers. On this visit I spent time with several groups of nuns and priests who were carrying out incredible work on a large scale. None seemed particularly shocked by this famine, and all had tried-and-tested systems they had been relying on and developing over many years. In Namitembo, a very remote and particularly famine-ravished area, lived two missionary priests, Father Owen O’Donnell from Glasgow and Father Frank from Liverpool. I stayed with them for a couple of nights. While each of them spoke with the strong distinctive accent of their home cities, I noticed that on their own in the evenings they spoke Chichewa, the local language, and I had the impression that by now they were more at home here than they ever would be back on the banks of the Clyde or Mersey. Their parish was enormous. Within its boundaries lived 80,000 people. A huge network of volunteers of home-based carers had been trained and developed to care for the sick people of the parish (most with AIDS here would die at home) and orphans. On the first evening of my stay Father Owen showed me their newly built secondary school, the only one in the whole area, complete with science laboratories. The creation of this place of education had obviously been a labour of love. At close inspection I noticed that the small sunken sinks in the laboratories were actually made out of cake tins. Beside the school were huge warehouses, piled high with enough food to meet the emergency needs of 880 families for another month, but Father Owen was already worried about how he would buy enough for the month of February. He needed to have it transported here soon before the rains might make the roads impassable.
The planting season here had already begun. Some recent rains encouraged many to plant maize, but without a single shower since, the people were terrified that this crop would be lost. They had no more seeds to replant. Life here was terrifyingly precarious.
I rose early to attend Mass in their simple church as the first beams of sunlight drifted through the windows. The small congregation, dressed in ragged clothes with calloused hands, looked as if they were on their way to the fields. At the end of the Mass, as most made their way out in silence, I noticed a lady walking up the aisle with a bundle on her head. This she rested on the bottom altar step and Father Owen came to it, prayed over it and blessed it. The lady then placed the bundle back on her head and serenely walked out towards the sun rising over the fields. I realized that within that cloth were the precious seeds that she was going to plant that day. I pondered for a while during the ‘after Mass silence’ on the act of faith I had just witnessed. Those seeds represented her own and her family’s future. Within them lay all her hopes and all her fears. Everything. Even life and death. She had been able to lay down all of that and in one simple heartfelt gesture had given it all to God and asked for His blessing. How much more difficult would it be for me to make the equivalent offering? With our Western layers of security and complexity this would not be an easy thing to do. How might it feel to be so utterly dependent on when the next rain will fall and on the God who created it? Or at least to be so acutely aware of it?
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.