Mags Gargan speaks to Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, the founder of children’s charity Mary’s Meals
It all begin with a simple concept, inspired by the words of Edward – a 14-year-old in Malawi orphaned by AIDS – on his hopes for the future: “I would like to have enough food to eat and I would like to be able to go to school one day.”
These words inspired Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow to set up Mary’s Meals, a children’s charity which now feeds over one million children in the developing world.
Magnus says it is the very simplicity of the idea, that every child receives one meal in their place of education, which is the secret to the project’s success. “It is very simple work but also very effective work,” he says. “For me it’s really important that we keep it that way and that is what makes it attractive to people. It is a universal mission and something that all of us understand – that first of all a child needs food. I think we all want that for our own children and other children.”
Fateful day
However, even before meeting Edward on that fateful day in 2002, Magnus had been involved in aid work, distributed through an incredible network of connections and coincidences, which reached out across the globe from the unlikely source of his father’s shed.
Magnus grew up in Argyll, Scotland. In 1983, a pilgrimage to the marian shrine of Medjugorje in Bosnia-Herzegovina renewed his family’s Catholic faith and led Magnus’ parents to convert their guesthouse into a retreat centre or ‘Family House of Prayer’.
“I still go to Medjugorje often and my family love going there,” Magnus says. “It’s a place where God chooses to pour out his Grace on many people and changes many hearts. It’s hard to explain without going there, but I certainly think of Mary’s Meals as another fruit of the grace at Medjugorje.”
Magnus began his career as a fish farmer, but when the Bosnian conflict was making headlines in the early 1990s, Magnus and his brother Fergus were moved to help and volunteered to drive a truck in an aid convoy into the warzone.
“Little acts of love” filled the trucks with donations from across Scotland and those first deliveries led to the formation of a charity, which became Magnus’ full time job.
Volunteers visiting parishes across Glasgow collecting donations and goods, filled lorries bound for Bosnia, and soon this was expanded to filling shipping containers bound for civil war refugees in Liberia and supporting children in Romania dying from AIDS.
The news coverage of the famine in Malawi in 2002 led the group to offer their services to people they knew doing emergency work in the country.
It was on a trip to Malawi visiting the emergency food-distributions projects that Magnus first met Edward and the idea for Mary’s Meals was born. From feeding just 200 children in Malawi in 2002, today the global charity provides one million children in 12 countries across four continents with a nutritious meal every day they attend school.
These life-changing meals attract hungry children into the classroom, giving them the opportunity to learn and the chance of a brighter future.
Enrolment and attendance rates at schools supported by Mary’s Meals increase dramatically after the introduction of the feeding programme and an entire generation have now completed their whole primary education with Mary’s Meals.
Magnus still lives in Dalmally, Argyll with his wife Julie and their seven children, and still runs what is now a global organisation from his father’s shed.
Looking back over what the charity has achieved, he says he feels “a permanent sense of surprise that all this is happening”. “I don’t feel I have achieved this. I am just one person who is part of this mission. I think of it as lots of little acts of love, lots of us doing different things and all together making something very beautiful,” he says.
A number of groups across Ireland support Mary’s Meals and the charity opened a Dublin office last year.
A group from Omagh and Coalisland have both recently signed up to cover all of the annual feeding costs of two primary schools in Malawi.
The Letterkenny Support Group organise an annual sponsored walk from Malin Town, Co. Donegal to Knock Shrine, Co. Mayo called ‘Step by Step to Feed a Child’.
The walk takes place over nine days starting on Friday, August 7 in Malin and finishing with Mass in Knock on August 15. The walkers will stop in the different towns along the route raising awareness and will be joined by walkers from Derry, Enniskillen, Dublin, Cork and Wexford.
“I absolutely believe this is a work of God and I feel a sense of privilege that God’s given me this opportunity to serve his little ones,” Magnus says.
“I think anyone who gets involved in Mary’s Meals for any length of time, regardless of their faith or beliefs, gets to see very quickly that something bigger than us is looking after it, because there does seem to be one extraordinary miracle after another.”
Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow’s book The Shed that Fed a Million Children, published by Harper Collins, is available in bookshops. All proceeds will go to Mary’s Meals. www.marysmeals.ie