Parish Charities

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Mary's Meal

We can be in despair when we look at all the suffering around us, but the Holy Spirit is always at work seeking to restore and save people from their situations. But to do this He also needs our participation and contribution, just as Jesus used the 5 loaves and two fish that belonged to a young boy to feed 5000 people all those years ago. It is thus always inspiring to see how when people do respond to promptings of the Spirit, the wonderful work that God can do to bring His kingdom here on earth.

The entire work of Scottish International Relief(SIR) of which Mary’s Meals is only one outreach has a sense of divine calling about it. It began, like many works of God, with a simple act of love by a couple of young men, Fergus and Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow. The Catholic faith of the whole family had come alive through a visit to Medjugorje in the early 1980s and when the area was engulfed by civil war in 1992, the MacFarlane-Barrow’s family felt they wanted to do something to help. Thus they launched an appeal in their local area to collect a lorry full of aid to send to the refugee camps near Medjugorje where they had received so much spiritually. Fergus and Magnus volunteered to drive this truck over. They only planned to make one trip, but when they returned they found the outhouses of the family home overflowing with yet more supplies which people were still sending in as they had heard what the young men were doing.

"I want to have enough to eat and go to school one day"

As a result Magnus decided he would put his work as a fish farmer on hold so he could continue to drive the supplies over until they ran out. But the supplies didn’t stop coming and it soon became necessary to set up a registered charity to cope with all the donations and the running of things. Various family members and friends were co-opted to help and people in parishes all over Scotland began to volunteer to help. As the need of the Bosnian refugees diminished so new areas of need opened up and through personal contact the work gradually began to spread to other countries. Horrified at the neglect he saw among HIV orphans in Romania, Magnus felt led to build three homes for abandoned children there. Then through the family’s connection with Fr Gary Jenkins, a missionary priest in Liberia, they set up mobile clinics for returning refugees. The biggest work of all, however, began in Malawi. Once again it started with a chance encounter Magnus had with a mother dying of Aids and her six young children. When Magnus asked her oldest son what he hoped for in life, he said simply, "To have enough to eat and to go to school one day."

This simple phrase haunted Magnus and so the Mary’s Meals campaign, dedicated to the patronage of Our Lady, was started with the intention of providing needy children with schooling and a meal a day. Once again it began small, simply providing 200 children in a school in Malawi with a basic meal. But over the last few years its reach has grown and grown as many people have been inspired by this simple idea to get involved. Today an estimated 200,000 children in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe are now being provided with a daily meal through Mary’s Meals.

"High volunteer factor"

The beauty of the scheme is the high volunteer factor, not just the fund raising in Scotland and elsewhere but on the ground in the countries where the scheme is operating. Here it is the mothers of the children themselves, who cook and distribute the food. All this has enabled Scottish International Relief to function on a miniscule administrative budget - only 1% of its gross revenue compared with most charities which run at 10-20%.

And the fruits are already beginning to show. One particularly inspiring story comes from a school called Kachere in a huge slum area in Malawi. The staff at the school were ecstatic recently because 45 of their senior pupils had just been given scholarships to attend secondary school because of their excellent exam results. Never before had any child from the school been offered a scholarship. They attributed the spectacular turn around in the pupils’ results simply down to Mary’s Meals. Being able to have a meal everyday meant that the children could both attend school and concentrate on their lessons. For them a whole new future had now been opened up as they would never have been able to pay the fees for secondary education. “Do you realise what this means for the future of Malawi? Do you understand?” a very excited government nutritionist had shouted to Magnus when he saw the results.

If you can’t feed one hundred people then feed just one.

--Mother Teresa

There is something about the ethos of SIR and Mary’s Meals and its simplicity that touches people’s hearts. Still working from a hut in the garden of the family home people are drawn to help them because of their prayer and their witness, whether it is wealthy businessmen like Sir Tom Farmer, who has become a recent sponsor or OAP’s like Harry, a warehouse volunteer or 8 year old Fern, who asked her family and friends to give the ?200 they were going to spend on birthday presents for her to Mary’s Meals so the children abroad could be fed and have a future. The latest scheme is to collect backpacks with a few educational supplies that can likewise be sent to needy children. Those who have any unwanted backpacks and who would be interested to know more about this scheme should contact SIR at the address provided.

Did you know?
It costs from just £5.30 to feed a child in school for a whole year.

There are now Mary’s Meals supporters groups in France, Germany, Ireland, Wales and Medjugorje as well as Scotland.