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.