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

‘A cheque arrived this morning from a priest in Ireland. We don’t know him. He doesn’t want a thank-you letter. He wants this to remain anonymous,’ she said, her voicing cracking with emotion. ‘It is for £4,200.’

4

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

MAHATMA GANDHI

It took me a long time to decipher how the jumble of numbers on my train ticket related to the carriages, compartments and bunk beds of a night train pulling out of Bucharest railway station, bound for Transylvania, just before midnight, on a very cold and dark April night in 1998. When I eventually found the right compartment I was dismayed to discover it full of young Romanian soldiers drinking beer. They did not look particularly happy when I entered and I felt a little intimidated. It took lengthy persuasion and much pointing at my ticket (they didn’t have English and I had no Romanian) before a young, well-built man with a shaven head gave up my bed upon which he had been sitting. As the train chugged through an area of bleak-looking high-rise flats in the suburbs of the capital city, one of the soldiers surprised me by offering me a swig of his beer. I accepted and just as I was handing the bottle back the window of our carriage smashed inwards. A small rock landed on the floor between the bunks and shattered glass sprinkled the cabin. The reaction of my travel companions suggested this was just an act of random vandalism, but as the cold night air rushed into our compartment, and we did our best to snuggle under our meagre blankets, I questioned the wisdom of travelling to this country I knew so little about. But then I remembered the email that had led me here. I had received it, out of the blue, a few weeks earlier from an American lady called Kristl Killian. She introduced herself as a volunteer who was working with children in Romania who had been abandoned in hospitals in the city of Targu Mures, and she was making a desperate plea for us to send basic supplies.

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