7
Yesterday is gone. Tomorrow has not yet come. We have only today. Let us begin.
MOTHER TERESA
At the foot of Michuru Mountain (on which the cross was being built) lay an impoverished township called Chilomoni, clustered along a road that curled out of Blantyre flanked by fruit sellers, barbers, mechanics and a myriad of other small businesses that plied their trade out of little stalls. Rows of tiny houses marched up the hillside behind them, homes to a growing population. In the middle of this settlement sat a large parish church and school.
Two hours north, on a plain beside the Shire River, in the rain shadow of a ridge of hills, lay the remote area of Chipini, reached only by long, rough, dusty tracks. A scatter of tiny villages of mud brick and thatch were surrounded by little fields of maize that often did not grow well. Amid these villages was a clinic run by some nuns, the Medical Missionaries of Mary, with whom we had worked to provide emergency food supplies during the famine.
These two spots presented themselves as good places to begin Mary’s Meals. Gay knew people in Chilomoni through the work she was doing to organize the construction of the cross and because the girls from Craig Lodge had spent some weeks there, living in a rented small house which she had arranged for them. Their time there had given us further insight into the plight of orphans in that community and they had drawn up lists of those in greatest need. Gay began talking to the people there to understand their situation and to introduce them to the concept. They expressed a huge desire for Mary’s Meals, and together with the community leaders she began planning for these to be introduced to the small primary school beside the parish church. Before long they had built a simple little kitchen and store in readiness for the project to begin.
From the outset we were convinced that Mary’s Meals could only be effective and long-lasting, if the local community ‘owned it’. We felt strongly that each school community needed to believe in this project and have a desire to support it at least as much as us. We wanted to avoid, at all costs, the mistake of imposing an idea on people; rather, we wanted it to be theirs more than ours. This would require a genuine respectful partnership in which the local community would give what they could to enable the provision of daily meals to their children, while we would support by providing the food and other required assistance that they were unable to afford. Specifically, this concept would depend on local volunteers making a commitment to organize and carry out the daily work of cooking and serving the food. We were determined to ensure this was not seen as another emergency feeding project, but a very specific, community-owned intervention aimed at schoolchildren and linked always to education. At Chilomoni, it became clear that the Parent Teachers’ Association (PTA) was the appropriate local body through which to organize. Following some community meetings at which a huge desire and enthusiasm for the Mary’s Meals project was amply demonstrated, the PTA agreed to take responsibility for organizing a rota of parents and grandparents who would take their turn in giving up a morning to prepare the meals.
Another thing we felt very strongly about was that, whenever possible, the food we provided should be locally grown rather than imported. We wanted to support the economy of the country and the local farmers at every opportunity. In Malawi there was an extremely popular porridge for children called Likuni Phala (‘Likuni’ being the name of the place where the dish had been carefully formulated for growing children by some pioneering nuns several years earlier, while ‘Phala’ simply means porridge). It consists of maize, soya and sugar, and is fortified with vitamins and minerals. It has become the dish of choice for Malawian children and their families. Gay knew a company who manufactured Likuni Phala, by buying the raw ingredients from smallholder farmers all over Malawi and processing them into a ready-mix that simply required cooking in boiling water before serving. The choice of this, as the food we could buy and serve, was a very straightforward one. The ingredients – aside from some of the added vitamins, which came from South Africa – were all grown within Malawi and the product was readily available, easy to transport and simple to cook. It was also wonderfully inexpensive!
During January 2003, the first Mary’s Meals were cooked and served at Chilomoni. That same week exactly the same thing was happening for the first time in those remote and hungry villages in Chipini. There, the impressive Medical Missionaries of Mary sisters had organized the school feeding programme, based on exactly the same model of local volunteers cooking Likuni Phala, for seven small primary schools. The rates of child malnutrition were particularly high there, and many children did not attend school because of hunger and poverty. And so it was that Mary’s Meals began in an urban and rural setting simultaneously.
My first visit to Chipini after the start of Mary’s Meals was, sadly, during another famine, for in 2003 food shortages here were more acute than ever. At Chinyazi primary school, skinny children queued quietly for their Mary’s Meals. Far too quietly. Many of the children walked past me, the white man with the camera, as if I wasn’t there: none of the usual laughing and jostling to get in the picture. It was already noon and they were more interested in eating for the first time that day. Little groups of children sat down in the dust and silently ate their porridge. For most of them this would be their only meal of the day. Near the school, outside a mud hut, I saw a ‘gogo’ (grandmother) sitting with her youngest grandchildren and I paid her a visit. She explained that her daughter, the children’s mother, had died and that she was the children’s sole carer. She told me in despairing tones that there was now no maize she could afford to buy in this whole area. Later on, her two older grandchildren, Allieta and Kondwande, arrived back from school carrying their grubby jotters and empty mugs (in which they had been served their Mary’s Meals). They had more energy now. They laughed when they saw me at their home and proudly showed Granny their schoolwork. They explained that the daily porridge was enabling them to attend school for the first time.
Within a few months of serving Mary’s Meals a few things became obvious. First of all it was plain to see that this was not just a nice idea. It was something that would actually work. The schools began to report that, after the introduction of the daily meals, children whose attendance rates had previously been very poor, because of illness and hunger, were now attending every day. They also began to see significant increases in enrolment. Children who had never been to school were coming for the first time, sent by parents who were assured their children would now eat every day and were therefore happy to give up the help they might have been providing in the fields and at home.
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 enjoy 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.’
To this day we strive to ensure that our paid staff have a feeling of vocation, a sense of ‘calling’, when they work for Mary’s Meals, regardless of their various personal faiths and beliefs. It is one of the reasons why our salaries will never compare well even with other similar-sized charities, let alone corporate organizations. People do not come to work for Mary’s Meals as way to get rich or as a simple career choice. Of course, sometimes people go on from Mary’s Meals to have good careers elsewhere, hopefully having learnt something in their time with us, and those of us who work for Mary’s Meals need to be able to survive and afford to feed our own families too. But always to work for Mary’s Meals as a paid employee will involve a sense of vocation and a sense of privilege that we are being paid to do this work when so many of our co-workers take part in this mission without any financial reward.
But most of our supporters didn’t live in castles. In Vienna, an old friend of Milona’s, Dr Christian Stelzer, had founded an organization called Oase des Friedens to spread the word about Medjugorje. When Christian learnt of Mary’s Meals he started to write articles in his monthly magazine about our work. The response was astounding. Thousands of people in Austria began to make generous donations and hundreds of thousands of euros were given for Mary’s Meals. Christian then invited me to give a talk at an annual prayer evening that they held in the enormous St Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. I arrived early and was amazed to find the church already packed full with thousands of people and more arriving each minute. Maria, one of the visionaries, was also there and it was lovely to catch up with her after a long time. She had her apparition on the altar steps and then Cardinal Schönborn celebrated the Mass. It was a very special evening. Afterwards many wanted to speak to us about Mary’s Meals, having heard the little talk I gave, which Milona translated. Among the many new supporters of Mary’s Meals in Vienna was Cardinal Schönborn himself, who became a wonderful advocate of the work of Mary’s Meals, which in later years he described as a fruit of Medjugorje. On different occasions he preached about our work and wrote articles on it.
The support in Austria has continued to grow in the years since. The way our work there developed was something hard to explain, certainly in terms of established fund-raising methods. For the first several years in Austria, there were no paid staff or full-time volunteers (although Christian, when he was not working long hours as a GP, spent hour upon hour, often through the night, writing about our work and organizing events) and yet the support base multiplied and proliferated way beyond the original Medjugorje network. As our work has grown around the world I am sometimes asked to give talks about fund-raising. I normally decline as I would never consider myself an expert in fund-raising; nor do I pretend to understand all that has happened with Mary’s Meals. And perhaps those things that I believe have been most important in our growth – prayer and trust in God’s providence as starting points – would not necessarily be received as helpful pearls of wisdom at fund-raising conferences. There were, however, things we learnt along the way, certain approaches and ways of doing things, which became dear to us. Our experience convinced us that it was important to concentrate mainly on supporting the growth of a grassroots movement. Thousands of people making regular donations appeared a safer way to support a long-term intervention like Mary’s Meals than becoming over-reliant on grants that would perhaps last only three years. And we felt that part of our core mission was to involve as many people as possible in this work, and to let people know that all could play a part no matter their circumstances, background, creed or race. Some, like my brother Mark whose health had deteriorated to a point where he could no longer help us in other ways, made prayer for Mary’s Meals a personal commitment. He would come to me often and ask if there was anything particular that he should pray for. I was normally able to supply him with a long list! And at Craig Lodge House of Prayer at that time lived Brother Paul, a saintly ninety-five-year-old Marist brother. Every morning he prayed for Mary’s Meals (and each day he was on his knees in our chapel before 6 a.m.) and the rest of the day he was the most incredible joyous advocate of our work, telling all who passed through the doors of the retreat centre about the marvels of Mary’s Meals.
One day Brother Paul mentioned to me that his grand-nephew happened to be Sir Terry Leahy, the well-known CEO of Tesco, and although he hardly knew him he had started writing to him about Mary’s Meals. He showed me one of the letters.
‘Magnus is a very tall man, but not at all scary … perhaps you would like to meet him?’ he had written. I laughed a lot at his choice of words but a couple of weeks later we were surprised and thrilled to receive a letter from Sir Terry, asking me to lunch at their HQ in London. After a series of meetings with him, other staff and board members, Tesco began to support Mary’s Meals very generously through their Foundation. And so the doors continued to open in all sorts of unexpected and amusing ways.
Another key philosophy that developed from this idea of Mary’s Meals being a ‘movement’ was that there should never be a sharp divide between givers and receivers. We wanted to develop a deep understanding that we were all walking together with the same goal. Those who lived among the poorest of the poor and gave up their time to cook the daily meals were unified with those rattling collecting cans, or making donations, in their desire to see the hungry child receive that daily meal. We wanted to ensure that those involved in the programme delivery part of the work never saw fund-raising as just some necessary evil, but rather another crucial part of the whole process – with equal beauty and ability to change lives.
For similar reasons, we felt we should look for funding in Malawi too, even if that seemed unlikely to be fruitful. Through Gay and David we met members of the small business community, and before long large sugar companies, banks and estate agents were supporting our work. In addition to generous funding others gave us ‘gifts in kind’. A sugar company shared their HR expertise and gave us a hugely reduced price on the sugar we required for our Likuni Phala, while a fuel company provided us free diesel for transporting the food. We organized high-profile events for these company executives in the cities of Blantyre, Lilongwe and Mzuzu, and a huge sense of pride and responsibility for Mary’s Meals was engendered. At one point in the early years of Mary’s Meals 10 per cent of our required budget in Malawi was being raised from within that country.
We also became great friends with some prominent members of the Asian business community – both Hindus and Muslims – who supported us generously through their charitable organization called Gift of the Givers. Often they funded the provision of water wells in schools where we wished to begin cooking meals but where there was no clean water supply, and over the years we enjoyed some wonderful dinners together marked by fascinating discussions about our various faiths. Years later we teamed up with Gift of the Givers to fly and ship food from Malawi to Somalia during the terrible famine there in 2011. I made a short visit there that year to see bags of Malawian Likuni Phala, labelled ‘Mary’s Meals’, being distributed to thousands of starving people in Mogadishu. It was the scariest place I ever visited. On my first evening, while unpacking in our makeshift accommodation, a loud close explosion made me jump. One of our gently spoken Somalian hosts, a young man with good English, turned to me and, as if soothing a small child, said, ‘Don’t worry. Don’t worry. It was just a bomb.’ For a few days I was surrounded by co-workers who at first light were on their prayer mats facing Mecca, while I sat on my bed saying my morning rosary, and despite the stressful situation we were all in, there was something about that interfaith mission to bring food to those suffering hunger that I will always treasure.
Meanwhile, back in Malawi, we continued to meet children whose lives had been resuscitated by Mary’s Meals. One day, Ruth and I visited a Mzedi school just outside Blantyre with Peter Nkata. The school was tucked into a rocky hillside, among little patches of cultivated soil, ready for planting and patiently awaiting the rains.
‘Small Peter! He is alive!’ exclaimed Peter Nkata, recognizing a boy in the crowd of children who surrounded us as we parked in the school playground.
‘I was sure that child was dead,’ he said as we climbed out of the vehicle. He pulled the little child, perhaps four years old, to himself and hugged him. Then he held him at arm’s length and delighted in his appearance. An older boy stood beside him, with eyes that looked too large for his solemn face and legs too thin to support his frame.
‘Your brother looks well, Lazaro,’ Peter said to him.
The boy nodded his head and smiled. Peter then told us their story.
Some months back the teachers at Mzedi had noticed that Lazaro, who had previously been a very punctual boy, had begun to turn up late every morning without explanation. They investigated and discovered the mother of the family had died, leaving Lazaro and Small Peter at home on their own. Some distant relatives sometimes visited but gave little support. Lazaro, who looked about eight but was actually twelve years of age, became the head of the household and tried to look after his little brother. But they didn’t have enough food at home and Lazaro depended almost entirely on his daily meal at school. Small Peter, inevitably, fell sick. As he grew weaker and weaker, Lazaro decided, literally, to take matters into his own hands. He knew that Mary’s Meals were providing food not only in his own primary school, but also in an Under 6 centre half a mile away from their home. He started to carry Peter there every morning and only after he had deposited him there safely, knowing that he would be fed and cared for, did he continue to school himself – arriving late and tired. When Peter Nkata had visited some weeks ago he’d heard that the carers at the U6 centre had taken Small Peter to the hospital and were not hopeful he would survive. The weeks without food had taken their toll. But here, right in front of us, was a bright-eyed, smiling Small Peter, with the hand of the brother who saved him on his thin shoulder.