The Shed That Fed a Million Children: The Mary’s Meals Story. Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow

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СКАЧАТЬ started to arrive in the post, much to our surprise. Hurriedly, Fergus and I organized a week’s holiday from the fish farms we worked on, and we used the donations of money to buy a second-hand Land Rover. We had learnt from those organizing the convoys out of London that four-wheel-drive vehicles were urgently needed for the distribution of aid in the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The plan, therefore, was to drive out with the convoy from London and to leave both the aid and the Land Rover in Medjugorje before flying home.

      Barely three weeks after that conversation in the pub, we found ourselves driving out of London, in a dangerously overladen Land Rover, heading for Dover and then on to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Our employers hadn’t been able to give us more than a week off work at such short notice and so, to ensure we could get there and back in the time available, we had roped in some friends to drive the first leg of the journey from Dalmally to London while we flew down to cut one day off the journey.

      And so it was that we arrived in Medjugorje once again, with a Land Rover bulging full of gifts for people we had never met, many of them living in abandoned railway carriages in a nearby refugee camp. This was the first time either of us had returned here since our visits in the early 1980s – our first visit here as grown men – and initially it jarred to see all the guest houses and hotels in places where there had once been only vineyards. But by the time we climbed Mount Krizevac, praying the Stations of the Cross as we went, and sat together at the foot of the enormous white cross at the summit, we knew that all of the blessings and graces we had experienced here as teenagers were being poured out for us again. We returned home with grateful hearts. And what I discovered at home surprised me. The donations of aid and money that had poured into Craig Lodge in response to our first little appeal had not stopped – in fact the trickle had become a deluge. The sheds that I had borrowed from my dad, beside Craig Lodge, were now full of medical aid, dry food, blankets and clothing. Mum and her friends were busy categorizing and packing the aid. I realized I had a decision to make and after praying and thinking about it for a few days, I handed in my resignation letter at the fish farm and put my house up for sale. It was not a difficult decision. I had for some time been searching for something else in my life and here, unexpectedly, was an opportunity. Mum had recently inherited a fairly valuable painting from a distant relative, which she sold to raise the money we needed to buy a small truck. Whenever I wasn’t sleeping in it I could sleep back home at Craig Lodge, she told me. And so with no particular time frame or ‘grand plan’ in my mind, and without any previous relevant experience, I found myself organizing the collection and delivery of aid to Bosnia-Herzegovina.

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       Little Acts of Love

      Give something, however small, to the one in need. For it is not small to the one who has nothing. Neither is it small to God, if we have given what we could.

      ST GREGORY NAZIANZEN

      All the while, back at home, Mum and Dad continued to phone everyone they knew. Over the years, thousands of people had stayed with them at the retreat centre and many had become dear friends. The calls, telling them about our new effort for the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina, quickly mobilized an army of co-workers. Not satisfied with that, Mum then wrote to every Catholic parish in Scotland seeking support. The response was incredible. All day long the phone rang with offers of help. Each morning the postman arrived with piles of letters containing cheques, representing personal donations, church collections or the proceeds of fund-raising events. Julie would spend hours on her typewriter writing thank-you letters, while I spent most of my time driving all over the country to pick up donations of goods and bring them back to the sheds at Craig Lodge, where we would sort through and pack them ready for shipment. It was hard work and we would not have managed without the numerous friends who helped on a regular basis. One of my favourite tasks was loading the trucks bound for Bosnia-Herzegovina. I felt a huge sense of responsibility to ensure that every last square centimetre was fully used so that each expensive, time-consuming journey delivered as much as possible to those in need. Fitting in the goods of different sizes, weights and fragility became like some kind of huge 3D jigsaw game. It was also hard physical work, something I was missing since leaving the fish farm where I had spent all day every day for six years doing physically demanding manual work. My least favourite job meanwhile was that of giving talks and presentations to people who were, understandably, asking for reports and feedback. Or more accurately, I imagined this would be my least favourite job, because for some time I managed to avoid each invitation by persuading Mum or Julie to do these talks to churches, schools or various other groups of supporters, while I conveniently prearranged to make a collection in some different corner of the country.

      In Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, a wonderful retired couple, John and Anne Boyle, came to our rescue. They set up a volunteer support group in the city, and obtained a free warehouse from the city council as well as a van to carry out local collections. Before long this became the biggest part of our operation. The free warehouse was a very welcome gift but hardly ideal in design. Our space was on the fourth floor, meaning all goods were transported in and out using a very old lift. On the days we loaded the truck for transport overseas, one team would repeatedly fill the lift on the fourth floor, before sending it down to the team below, who carried it out to the truck. More than once the lift broke down. We came to understand that the city authorities would only send out a technician immediately to repair it if there was someone stuck in the lift, otherwise we could be left for hours, or even days, without a way to complete the loading. We eventually discovered we could climb inside the stuck lift, through its roof, and sometimes resorted to doing this prior to phoning the council.

      ‘Yes, there is someone inside,’ we would answer honestly and accurately. I think probably they had a very good idea what we were up to, when they arrived to find one of us inside, red-faced and squeezed in beside a stack of boxes, but it seemed like they, along with everyone else in the city, just wanted to be part of the effort and keep the aid moving. While, initially, much of our support in Glasgow came through the churches, when the large Muslim community there heard of our work, they became very involved too. They organized collections of food at the mosques on a regular basis and would deliver huge quantities to our stores. Many in this Asian community, mainly of Pakistani descent, were involved in wholesale food retailing and they often donated us their surplus stocks. But we could never get enough dried and tinned food. It was always top of the lists of urgent requests we were being sent from Bosnia-Herzegovina. We began to approach supermarkets and seek their permission to carry out food collections. They would allow us to park an empty shopping trolley at their entrance and hand leaflets to customers entering the store, inviting them to buy an item on our list and deposit it in the trolley on the way out. A small team of us would target a different store every weekend with this approach and the willingness of people to donate this way amazed us. It was efficient, too, as a team in the back of our van would categorize and pack each product separately as it came in. We usually returned to the warehouse late in the evening with full boxes ready to deliver, marked Tinned veg, Pasta, Sugar and so on. Nearly all the boxes we used as packaging were donated by whisky distillers. They were strong boxes, ideal, but could cause huge excitement and consternation at border posts. Customs officials and police would stand open-mouthed when we responded to their requests to open the back of our truck for inspection, their immediate assumption being that these ‘humanitarians’ were actually whisky smugglers. They usually seemed a little disappointed when we opened the boxes to reveal their more mundane contents. As time went on we became aware of another interesting pattern at the supermarket collections. At those in the deprived areas of Glasgow – often housing schemes with some of the worst rates of unemployment and poverty in the UK – we noticed that we would be donated significantly more than at those in the more affluent suburbs. Not something I can pretend to explain the reasons for, but something real and quite marked none the less.

      I found ‘giving patterns’ a little harder to predict while doing street collections for money. This was an activity I enjoyed much less than the supermarket СКАЧАТЬ