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

Meanwhile, I headed to Stirling University to study history, although in my heart I never wanted to leave Argyll. Much of my childhood had been spent deer-stalking and working outside and I had never held a desire to move to a city, nor had any particular career in mind. And my best friends were all staying and finding jobs around Dalmally. But I had done well in my exams at school, and because it seemed expected of me I headed off for the university. History had been my favourite subject and so I chose to study that. I did not last long in Stirling, though. I found my shyness, which I had coped with so far by staying in the company of close friends when socializing, became crippling in this new environment. I could not talk to the other students never mind make friends with them, and every weekend I would hitch-hike home to see my friends and play shinty. With my beloved Glenorchy stripes on and shinty stick in my hands, I would become happy and confident again for ninety minutes. ‘Well played, the Big Man!’ the older men watching on the sideline would shout when I won a tackle or hit the ball up the field (fortunately, teammates such as Foxy, the Heekor and Pele had earned more imaginative nicknames). Then I would travel back to the university campus and hide in my room. After six months I nearly broke my mother’s heart by giving up and dropping out. I returned to Argyll to work outside again – planting trees for the Forestry Commission, stacking timber at a sawmill and then eventually becoming a salmon farmer. For six years I was part of a small team looking after the salmon that swam in the huge net cages that floated on Loch Craignish, a secluded deep-sea loch 4 miles from the nearest tar road. It was a place of great peace and I enjoyed the quiet but strenuous daily routine. It was good place to think and pray, and the boys I worked with became good friends too. I thought I would probably spend the rest of my days living and working in this part of Scotland and most of the time I was quite happy at that prospect, although the long, dark, cold winters often prompted thoughts of exotic warmer lands and new experiences.

But then one rainy evening, in November 1992, Fergus and I walked down to our local pub for a pint. It was unusually quiet. There had been no shinty match that day because of a waterlogged pitch and very few of our mates had shown up. We began to chat about what we had seen on the television earlier that night. A news report had shown the suffering of the people in Bosnia-Herzegovina who had fled ethnic cleansing and who were now in refugee camps. The Yugoslavia we had visited as teenagers was tearing itself apart. In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia had declared themselves independent; a move which ignited a war between the Serbs, who had dominated the Yugoslav state, and those wishing to break away. A year later Bosnia-Herzegovina, home to Croats, Muslims and Serbs, exploded into civil war – a gruesome conflict played out in front of the world’s cameras. In Medjugorje, Our Lady Queen of Peace was still appearing to the same six young people, and the title she had given herself had taken on a new significance. Over the years her messages were invariably about the way to peace, about how wars would be avoided if we lived the Gospel message. Exactly ten years to the day after she appeared to those six children in Medjugorje, the first shots of the war had been fired. As the horror unfolded and a stream of reports of bloody massacres, ethnic cleansing and mass rape stunned modern-day Europe, the reason for some of Our Lady’s messages and the urgency with which she had spoken them became much more clear. Perhaps too few of those of us who had been privileged to hear and believe her messages had really ever put them into practice in our lives.

This particular bulletin had focused on a camp near Medjugorje and probably for this reason we began talking about how much we would like to help the people there. We knew of a group in London that was organizing the transport of aid to Medjugorje, and we began discussing the idea of making an appeal locally for aid and driving it out with one of these convoys. After closing time, walking back home alongside the black river which had, all those years earlier, nearly stopped us from visiting Medjugorje, we talked ever more enthusiastically about a return visit.

The next day we shared the idea with the rest of our family and almost immediately, before we could ponder it further, our little appeal was launched. Mum and Dad phoned various friends and regular visitors to the retreat centre to ask if they would help, and before long parcels of food, clothing and medicines were being delivered to our house. Donations of money also 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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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.