The Shed That Fed a Million Children

by Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow

  We left the people of Ngwanda much later than planned. The sun had already set as we followed the truck, now half full, further on round Nkhoma Mountain to a more remote village at the very end of the road. We felt guilty as we knew the people of Mgonzo had been waiting for us all day. When we finally arrived, the light of a full moon was casting shadows between the little cluster of homes set on the side of a steep hill. Here we were met with whispered greetings. These people were even more hungry and certainly much weaker. They explained to us that they had been eating leaves, roots and unripe bananas during the previous few weeks. In some ways the quiet, almost speechless, thanks of these people was more moving than the demonstrative lively welcome that we had received earlier that day. For several minutes after unloading we sat beside the dark pile of food in complete silence – a profound and grateful silence that I will never forget – and it was with reluctance that we eventually got up to take our leave. The peaceful villagers whispered their farewells and, after whispering our promises to return, we left them sitting again in silence beside glowing fires.

  The next day Ruth and I boarded a crowded bus from Lilongwe to Blantyre. The views on the four-hour journey were exhilarating, and at one high point on the road we thought we could see Lake Malawi sparkling in the far distance and what we presumed were the faint blue hills of Mozambique beyond. When the bus finally pulled over in the city centre of Blantyre we saw a white couple standing on the pavement waving at the bus. The husband, perhaps sixty years old and a little overweight, wearing unusually thick glasses, was sporting a sweatshirt with Russell Athletic emblazoned on it.

  ‘That must be David and Gay!’ said Ruth, pointing and laughing, as we grabbed our bags and climbed off the hot bus. We really had not known what to expect and that first impression of a man with a self-deprecating sense of humour was not, we soon discovered, misplaced. After warm hugs and a thirty-minute drive, we found ourselves in the living room of their house, perched on a hilltop with a breathtaking view across the city to the hazy plain and hills beyond. Over dinner their stories came tumbling out. We learnt that both of them had spent almost their entire lives in Africa, having grown up in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) before moving to spend their married life in Malawi, where David worked with Knight Frank and as an economic adviser to government, while Gay flew as a pilot for a large sugar corporation. We were entertained by them telling one hilarious anecdote after another. Gay also explained that after receiving Mum’s letter she had visited Medjugorje herself for the first time in 1986. After that she began helping to set up prayer groups and Medjugorje centres across Southern Africa, as well as organizing several large groups to travel from Malawi to Medjugorje on pilgrimage. In 2000, Tony Smith had contacted her and together they began to build a Way of the Cross on the edge of Blantyre, a replica of the Medjugorje one, for all those who could never travel to Europe.

  ‘Oh, and by the way,’ Gay said, ‘I still have that letter.’ She went out of the room and a few minutes later returned with Mum’s handwritten note. With it was a faded photograph of Ruth and me as teenagers, with the visionaries in Medjugorje, which Mum must have sent her with the letter. We laughed and cried. So did Gay. We were moved by a very deep sense of God’s plan unfolding in our lives. ‘You God botherers!’ exclaimed David. ‘A lot of stuff and nonsense!’

  For the rest of that evening, and on many others, David poked fun at Gay and us, but somehow he never managed to sound truly cynical, and certainly when it came to acts of kindness and good works it soon became very apparent that he had a lot to teach the ‘God botherers’ in the room. Later, Gay told us that David had actually bought her those flights to Medjugorje as a present and insisted she went. It also seemed that half the priests and nuns in Malawi used their house as a regular place of retreat, with constant comings and goings through David’s open door. And he and Gay were also heavily involved in the famine relief effort, supporting various groups and providing a wealth of local knowledge and experience to people like us who were hoping to do something useful.

  ‘I hope you don’t mind, but we have a busy few days organized for you two!’ Gay told us as at last we headed, dog-tired, to our beds. ‘And we’ll make sure we take you to the top of the mountain where we are building that silly cross,’ said David.

  The next few days certainly were busy. We visited various friends of Gay’s who were involved in famine relief and other good works. Among these were some young volunteers from Israel who were running a small primary health-care clinic on the shores of Lake Malawi. To get to Chembe, where they worked, we drove down an uncomfortably bumpy track and laughed at the baboons that were hanging from trees beside the road. We gasped when we finally saw the famous lake, sparkling azure blue, and a little thatched-hut village strung along the edge of a sweeping, white sandy beach. It was just like a picture from a glossy tourist magazine, complete with fishermen beside dugout canoes, mending their nets. At first glance it looked idyllic, but it wasn’t. Irit and Yogi, the two young Israeli girls, welcomed us at their clinic and gave us a hugely informative and depressing overview of life here in the lakeside community they had made their home. As we walked through the village, they explained that of 11,000 people living here already 800 were orphans – and that figure was growing rapidly. The AIDS epidemic was wiping out a huge swathe of people of childbearing age, leaving children to be cared for by their grandparents or other wider members of the family. This was a horror story unfolding across every village in Malawi, a country in which 16.4 per cent of those between fifteen and forty-nine years of age were infected – the second highest HIV/AIDS rate in the world. The numbers dying of the disease were already staggering, but now the chronic hunger that was stalking the land was making an already catastrophic situation even more terrible. The average life expectancy had plummeted to thirty-nine years and, while approximately 140 people were dying every day, it was predicted that Malawi was still some years away from its AIDS peak. As we had already learnt in Romania, a healthy diet with plenty of protein is the first most essential need for someone who is HIV-positive. And yet here, in this village, people were going three days at a time without food. A group of children gathered round us as we continued our tour, jostling for position beside us. Irit pointed out a graveyard at the back of the village, where sandy mounds stretched back to the hillside.

  ‘There are four or five funerals every day now,’ she told us, as an elderly man greeted her and beckoned us urgently into his courtyard. Inside his wife was lying on a mat, trying to comfort her grandchild. The thin child moaned continuously and they explained to us that his parents had died and they were now ‘mother and father’ to the child, rather than grandparents. Irit, having examined the boy, surprised us by asking if we could pay the fare for a car to take him to a proper health clinic. ‘He needs to get medicine immediately,’ she said as we handed over the pitifully small amount of money required.

  Having arranged things for the couple, Irit led us on through the village. A lady carrying a very large metal bucket of water on her head stopped to chat to Irit. The bucket had a leak and the water was trickling out. As she smiled and joked with Irit, she held a small tin mug to catch the precious water trying in vain to escape from her.

  Nearby we stopped at a little market where Irit bought some fish for our lunch. ‘The hunger is terrible here not just because the crops have failed, but because the lake is over fished.’ She pointed out the drying tables nearby. Some had a few small silver fish on them while many were bare. ‘These tables used to be covered with fish. They would dry them and sell them. So not only did they have fish to eat but a source of income too.’

  We took the fish to Mrs Kaswaya, a friend of Irit’s who was to cook lunch for us at her home. She greeted us shyly and placed a mat on the ground for us to sit on. We sat quietly with her and ate the fish and Nsima with our hands, struggling with the heat of the food. Mrs Kaswaya and her four children giggled at us. On the way back Irit said she would like us to meet a friend of
hers, Teresa, an eighteen-year-old girl who, in the face of hunger, had turned to prostitution to survive. Now she had AIDS and was dying. Irit called outside her door and eventually we heard some movement. Teresa crawled slowly out. Her stick-thin legs were no longer able to support her; Irit was as shocked as us. We sat down on the sand beside Teresa and Irit chatted to her quietly for some time. She held her hand tenderly and eventually said goodbye. She did not have anything else to give her.

  We eventually left Chembe and bumped back up the rough road, past the baboons, in silence, realizing that what we had witnessed that day was a microcosm of Malawi. The battle against hunger, AIDS and degrading poverty was one being played out in every village across this land. It seemed to me that these malnourished, weakened people, deprived of the weapons of education and good health, were engaged in a horribly one-sided fight.

  The itinerary put together by the Russells over the remainder of our stay gave plenty of other opportunities to learn about Malawi and to meet some of the warriors who were refusing to give up. Among such characters was a tiny, but formidably strong, nun from the Philippines, who was running day centres for children below school age in Blantyre. Most of these children were orphans and in desperate need of food and care. Her approach was to support and train local volunteers to run this project and to ensure they saw it as ‘their project and responsibility’ rather than that of some foreign organization.

  ‘These are your children, not mine. This is your responsibility more than it is mine,’ Sister Lilia said quite fiercely to the group of local volunteers at one of her training days, to which she had invited us. At first I was a little taken aback by her apparent lack of compassion towards these volunteers, who were, after all, giving up their time to do a very noble task in difficult circumstances. However, I soon began to understand that her philosophy was not born out of a lack of love but rather from real, genuine charity that wanted to help set these people free from reliance on aid.

  Each of the twenty-one nurseries in her project was run by a management committee with members of the local community taking up the roles of office bearers. Their newfound responsibilities and the training provided often helped them find a new confidence. A recent innovation had also seen them begin to accept children from parents who could pay a fee for ‘child care’ and in this way some of the funding required to provide meals to the impoverished children was met, rather than the project relying entirely on the support of donations and grants.

  I was hugely impressed by the way this project worked. I was growing increasingly uneasy about aid flown in and sometimes imposed on local communities in a way that seemed to strip people of their dignity and sense of responsibility, and that gave little thought to a future beyond such immediate intervention. Of course there was a place for emergency responses, which were at that very moment saving millions of lives in Malawi and among which our own project was playing a small part. But I had come to believe that the war against poverty and hunger here could only truly be won by the people of Malawi themselves, not by aid givers from outside, no matter how important and faithful our support for them might be.

  And those U6 centres were a joy to visit! In each one we were greeted by around sixty or seventy toddlers, sitting in rows, being introduced by their volunteer teachers to numbers and letters. Whenever we arrived we would be greeted by a child who would stand and extend to us a well-rehearsed formal greeting.

  ‘Introduction. My name is Paul. I am four years old. I am a boy.’ And the next one would stand to repeat the formula. ‘Introduction. My name is Veronica. I am five years old. I am a girl.’ And after a number of ‘introductions’ they would sing and clap and melt our hearts.

  Some of these little children were by now living in ‘child-headed families’. Orphaned, and without adult support, they were being cared for by older siblings who were sometimes primary-school age themselves. The food being provided at these centres was saving the lives of these children and the introduction to education was a gift that might just open up an escape from poverty. The centres were also a place of safety and care for these children while the elder sibling attended school or worked to survive.

  On the last morning of this first visit, before heading to the airport, we rose early to climb through the woods to the top of Michuru Mountain, where they had started work on the foundations for their huge concrete cross. The view from there was breathtaking. The whole of the city of Blantyre was spread beneath us, with the vast plains and hills beyond. We prayed a rosary with Gay as we drank in the vista. When we had finished we took from our pockets some pebbles carried from our own hill in Scotland – the one behind Craig Lodge on which Dad had built ‘Stations of the Cross’ – and some from the hill in Medjugorje where the apparitions of Our Lady first took place. These we placed into the open foundations, already full of Malawian stones, and we prayed for blessing upon this project and upon Malawi. And I promised the Russells I would be back very soon.

  On our return home we began fund-raising furiously. A number of those we had met in Malawi, who were carrying out such great work, were desperately in need of funding to feed more mouths and we had promised them we would do whatever we could. With Gay co-ordinating things at the Malawi end we were able immediately to begin sending funds to our new friends. We wrote about our experiences in Malawi in our own newsletters and managed to generate some media coverage.

  Whenever I returned from a trip overseas I would give a little talk and show pictures to the volunteers and members of the youth community living at Craig Lodge, who had given up a year there to pray and serve those coming to stay on retreat. It was very often through the people who came to stay on retreat at Craig Lodge that our work grew, so it was important to keep the community up to date and passionate about our efforts, ensuring they could speak to those guests who were interested and wanted to learn more. Three days after this particular talk Maureen Callaghan, one of the community members, approached me to say that when I had spoken to them about Malawi, she felt a fire burning within her heart and she could not stop thinking about what she had heard and her desire to go and help. She had not slept the two nights since. She had never been anywhere in the developing world and had not previously had any particular desire to do so. Two other girls in the community – Lisa and Nicola – also felt moved in the same way. So they decided to make a ‘mission trip’ there, funded by Craig Lodge Trust (the charity set up to administer the House of Prayer). Gay was delighted to hear this news and immediately set about finding them a small house to rent at the foot of their ‘cross mountain’ in Blantyre. Here they lived for five weeks among the poorest of the poor, supporting Sister Lilia, and began to work with the local parish priest to identify children most in need of help.

  Three months after my first visit, in November 2002, I returned to Malawi, this time to visit those we were by now funding and other groups that Gay knew needed help. I was accompanied this time by two journalists from the Herald, Scotland’s largest-selling quality newspaper, who had agreed to write a magazine article about the situation in Malawi and our efforts to help. By now, as predicted, the effects of the famine had worsened. Even without a famine, November often marked the start of the hungry months, but this year people had already long exhausted any reserves they might have had.

  I had realized by now that most effective emergency food-distribution projects were very often being delivered by the churches, which had the advantage of a permanent structure which could be mobilized to create networks of community volunteers. On this visit I spent time with several groups of nuns and priests who were carrying out incredible work on a large scale. None seemed particularly shocked by this famine, and all had tried-and-tested systems they had been relying on and developing over many years. In Namitembo, a very remote and particularly famine-ravished area, lived two missionary priests, Father Owen O’Donnell from Glasgow and Father Frank from Liverpool. I stayed with them for a couple of nights. While each of them spoke with the strong distinct
ive accent of their home cities, I noticed that on their own in the evenings they spoke Chichewa, the local language, and I had the impression that by now they were more at home here than they ever would be back on the banks of the Clyde or Mersey. Their parish was enormous. Within its boundaries lived 80,000 people. A huge network of volunteers of home-based carers had been trained and developed to care for the sick people of the parish (most with AIDS here would die at home) and orphans. On the first evening of my stay Father Owen showed me their newly built secondary school, the only one in the whole area, complete with science laboratories. The creation of this place of education had obviously been a labour of love. At close inspection I noticed that the small sunken sinks in the laboratories were actually made out of cake tins. Beside the school were huge warehouses, piled high with enough food to meet the emergency needs of 880 families for another month, but Father Owen was already worried about how he would buy enough for the month of February. He needed to have it transported here soon before the rains might make the roads impassable.

  The planting season here had already begun. Some recent rains encouraged many to plant maize, but without a single shower since, the people were terrified that this crop would be lost. They had no more seeds to replant. Life here was terrifyingly precarious.

  I rose early to attend Mass in their simple church as the first beams of sunlight drifted through the windows. The small congregation, dressed in ragged clothes with calloused hands, looked as if they were on their way to the fields. At the end of the Mass, as most made their way out in silence, I noticed a lady walking up the aisle with a bundle on her head. This she rested on the bottom altar step and Father Owen came to it, prayed over it and blessed it. The lady then placed the bundle back on her head and serenely walked out towards the sun rising over the fields. I realized that within that cloth were the precious seeds that she was going to plant that day. I pondered for a while during the ‘after Mass silence’ on the act of faith I had just witnessed. Those seeds represented her own and her family’s future. Within them lay all her hopes and all her fears. Everything. Even life and death. She had been able to lay down all of that and in one simple heartfelt gesture had given it all to God and asked for His blessing. How much more difficult would it be for me to make the equivalent offering? With our Western layers of security and complexity this would not be an easy thing to do. How might it feel to be so utterly dependent on when the next rain will fall and on the God who created it? Or at least to be so acutely aware of it?