During April 2004 we brought the rice, vegetables and some ‘boney’ (small dried fish) – enough for the first two weeks’ meals – to Massatin, and these were stored carefully in a little room at the back of the school. We were frustrated that there was no possibility of buying locally grown rice in a country completely reliant on imported food, but decided that, for now at least, the most important thing was for the children to be fed and in school. Again the local community had built a simple shelter to serve as a kitchen and two elderly women cooked the eagerly anticipated food in two large pots on an open fire. Eventually the children were invited to line up for the meals, which were served into colourful plastic plates. Within minutes 162 children were sitting silently in clusters under trees or in the shadow of the school walls, devouring their delicious meals. Their parents gathered beside the kitchen to clap and sing their joy.
Afterwards, I watched the children with big smiles file back into their classes. Through an open door I could read a question on the blackboard.
‘What do you have to offer the Lord?’ the teacher had asked his class that morning.
And below he had neatly written the children’s answers.
‘I have my hands.’
‘I have my life.’
‘I have my soul.’
‘I have my heart.’
‘I have my song.’
‘I have my dream.’
Before long Mary’s Meals was being served in a number of other schools in the town of Tubmanburg and the villages round about. And again the numbers of children enrolling increased quickly and dramatically.
Yousif Sheriff, the headmaster of an Islamic school just off Tubmanburg’s little main street, showed us round his crowded classrooms. He explained with glee that since we began providing Mary’s Meals here his school roll had increased from 302 to 425. That story was repeated in the community school just along the street, as well as in the villages where teachers told us happily that hunger and the search for food no longer prevented children attending school.
By the time we had satisfied ourselves that in Liberia Mary’s Meals would produce the same positive results we had seen in Malawi, we had begun to receive many requests from hungry schools. We pondered which areas should be our priority.
In 2005, a close friend of mine, Alex Keay, who had grown up with me in Dalmally, and who was also a fish farmer, volunteered a year of his life to work in Liberia to support our fast-growing programme there. Not long after his arrival, Father Garry began to suggest we help the people of the Bellah district. They were a very small tribe, the smallest of the sixteen ethnic groups in Liberia, living in remote, virgin rainforest. Father Garry had a deep affection for them because when he had been kidnapped by child soldiers during the war and taken by them on a three-week trek to Guinea, their route had taken him through the villages of the Bellah, and the tribe’s kindness to him during his short stay was something that moved him profoundly. He had promised that if he survived he would come back and help them one day. Father Garry used his considerable powers of persuasion on Alex, whose adventurous nature was only encouraged by the description of the arduous journey there. So Alex and some of our more experienced Liberian team members made the fourteen-hour drive to the Bellah on what could only loosely be described as a road. By the time I arrived on my next visit, the groundwork had been done with those communities, volunteers organized, and the first food deliveries made. Mary’s Meals was now being served to three village schools in the Bellah district and I decided to travel there to see it for myself.
During the last six hours of our journey there we never passed one other vehicle. Our four-wheel-drive pickup slipped and strained along a dirt track, roughly gouged out many years previously by a logging company. They had constructed bridges by laying huge logs across streams and rivers, and as our driver inched slowly along these trunks we prayed his wheels wouldn’t slip and that the logs wouldn’t snap. On each side of us the rainforest towered towards the sky. Huge frogs leapt out of puddles as we approached and squirrels scuttled for cover. Now and again a ‘chicken hawk’ flapped off the road ahead of us and disappeared away up above the trees. Once we came upon a group of people who had been paid to clear this lonely overgrown road. These former fighters and their families, armed with machetes, had hacked down the trees on the edge of the road for many miles. Beside their makeshift camp, over an open fire, they were smoking recently shot deer and monkey. Alex – who seemed to have learnt ways of doing things here remarkably quickly – haggled to buy some meat.
‘Why you white people not bring bread from Monrovia?’ a laughing young man said to us as he handed over some prime cuts of monkey.
A little further on, at the top of a steep climb, we passed a burnt-out pickup. Inside was the skeleton of a government soldier who had been ambushed by rebels several years previously. The forest road seemed endless and I began to understand why no other aid organizations were working in these areas.
As the sun began to dip behind the tallest trees, we finally reached Belleh Balama: a cluster of thatched huts in a wide clearing. A crowd of laughing, waving children dressed in tattered clothes swarmed round us, screaming their welcome. A group of village elders met us and showed us into the mud-and-wattle hut we were to sleep in. The family of the house embarrassed us by moving out to make sure their visitors had a bed. The elders gave each of us a new name. For the duration of my stay here I became Mr Tanjo – ‘the owner of the land’. After welcome speeches, in accordance with local custom, they gave us cola nuts to chew, a white chicken and a silver coin (an old Liberian dollar). Before long we were playing football with a group of local men, while the women played kickball in a field nearby. Later a thin, tall young woman called Helen, who had been assigned to look after us during our stay, warmed water on an open fire for our ‘baths’ (taken in a tiny wicker-panel cubicle behind the house), and cooked us rice and the monkey meat we had purchased earlier. Some of the locals gathered with us and together we drank ‘God to Man’ (a palm wine tapped straight from palm trees that requires no brewing). That night, sleep came easily in the beautiful, dark and silent village.
The next day the three schools that were receiving Mary’s Meals were closed so that all the children could take part in a day of celebration and welcome for us. We were treated to beautiful songs written specially for us. ‘You are welcome, Mr Tanjo! You are welcome! We hope that you bring good news!’ sang the young choir.
I talked to them about Mary’s Meals. When they asked, I explained that Mary was the mother of Jesus and that when Jesus was very little they’d had to flee from men who wanted to kill them, and that they too had known poverty, hardship and hunger. Later, after several plays and the exchange of many speeches, it was time for Mary’s Meals to be served to all 500 children present. As we made our way to a recently constructed thatched ‘dining room’, we were struck by an incredibly violent storm, which no one seemed to have guessed was coming. A roaring wind began to rip up the thatched roofing, the sky turned dark and thunder crashed around us. As we ran for shelter from the deluge we got an even bigger surprise as we bumped into a group of UN peacekeeping soldiers and two smartly dressed white civilians, who had appeared as if from nowhere and who were seeking the same shelter. After getting over the surprise of such an unlikely meeting, we began chatting. They had just landed by helicopter and were part of a security assessment team for West Africa. They had come to make an inspection as there had been a large arms cache here during the war. As we talked, the rain eased, and the serving of Mary’s Meals began. The men from the UN looked more surprised than ever. One of them, Captain Alec from Kyrgistan, congratulated us sincerely on what we were doing.
‘What you are doing will work,’ he said. ‘We are trying to prevent a return to violence by taking away guns. But if people want to fight they will hide the guns. How could we find them in this forest? But you, if you can feed the children and get them into school, that will build real lasting peace here.’
The next day we made a two-hour walk through the forest to the next small village, called Kanata, which could not be reached by road. At one point our journey involved wading through some swamps and Helen, still conscientiously looking after her visitors, led the way with a briefcase balanced on her head. This contained jotters, pens and pencils – gifts we had taken for school pupils in Kanata. As we walked she told us a little of her own tragic war story, describing how she was forced at gunpoint to carry loot all the way to Guinea, and left me with the impression that this was only a small part of what she had suffered. The children of Kanata stared especially intently at us as our unusual little group strode into their village. Alex explained to me that when he had visited here for the first time a couple of weeks previously, he had been told they had not seen a white man in their village since 1988. The children held our hands and stroked our strangely hairy arms.
As always, according to custom, we were greeted formally by the village elders and given the ceremonial gifts. We were then taken to their ‘palava hut’, the place for village meetings, and were served platefuls of rice and bush meat. I felt a little disconcerted by the crowd who pressed silently round to watch us eat. As I was about to tuck into my meal, Alex nudged me and said very quietly, ‘Magnus, what kind of animal do you think these belonged to?’
I looked at his plate to see a pair of testicles – those of a deer or a monkey, I think – presented proudly, all alone, on a bed of rice. While the elders continued to stare intently at us we began, despite our most strenuous efforts, to laugh uncontrollably until the tears were streaming down our faces. We managed, eventually, to eat the testicles. Thankfully, no offence was taken. If the truth be told, I have never done anything particularly heroic in service of Mary’s Meals, but that meal came closest.
Afterwards we began to discuss with the elders a plan to begin Mary’s Meals in their village also. It was agreed that once a month the men of the village would walk to Balama (the furthest point a vehicle could reach) and carry back the food delivered there for them. They were eager to begin as soon as possible. Their children were hungry, they told us.
The following morning, back in Balama, I opened my bedroom shutter to see two small children carrying little wooden home-made chairs towards their school. They were followed by older girls carrying buckets on their heads – the water for Mary’s Meals. After their classes had begun we visited the little bullet-scarred school.
I spent some time chatting to Nyango, who was standing with a giggly group of friends. She was thirteen years old but until very recently, like many other girls in the village, she had never attended school. Every morning while her brothers walked along the path to the mud-brick classrooms under the huge cotton trees on the edge of the village, she had stayed at home, working with her parents as they strove to feed, clothe and shelter their family. Her days had been spent carrying water from the river, collecting firewood, pounding palm nuts for oil and working on the land to grow rice and vegetables. In recent years, along with other villagers who chose not to flee, she had been forced at gunpoint to carry ammunition and arms for rebel soldiers as they waged war on Liberia’s previous regime.
But three weeks previously, the day the first Mary’s Meals were served here, her life changed. That day many parents, including Nyango’s, decided it was now possible to send their children to school. While we talked, some of Nyango’s younger classmates played in the dust nearby. Nearly all had distended stomachs and discoloured hair, the result of the daily hunger they had lived with.
After they had all eaten their meal, they resumed class. Nyango’s teacher pointed to some arithmetic on the board and began asking questions. Next door I noticed Helen, the young woman who had cared for us during our visit, sitting at a desk among the smallest schoolchildren. We had just seen three of her children eat Mary’s Meals in the school playground. And she, too, was a pupil here. The war might have robbed her of the chance to read and write, but now she was sitting in a primary one class with no shame, just a happy determination to learn. She beamed a broad smile at us through the open door when we looked in, and continued writing in her jotter.
Before we started our long journey back to Tubmanburg, the elders wished us heartfelt farewells.
‘Remember your name is Mr Tanjo!’ they shouted to me as we climbed into the pickup.
We continued to work hard to reach more schools. Our programme grew rapidly, and numbers of staff with it. We decided it was time to move out of the accommodation generously provided by Father Garry on his mission. The community leaders in Tubmanburg gifted us a generous piece of land only ten minutes’ walk away on which to build a home for Mary’s Meals. By now Liesbeth Glas, a lay missionary from the Netherlands, and someone who had lived for many years with Liberians – mainly in refugee camps in Ghana – had become our first Country Director here. She had a deep understanding and love for the local people – and for Mary’s Meals. It was she who organized the building of our first office and staff house on the donated land. But even before it was complete she approached us with another request – one very close to her heart.
Everywhere in Bomi County, through the work of the clinic, or the setting up of Mary’s Meals in schools, we met children who were deaf. The complete absence of even basic primary health care meant that many here suffered lifelong impairments caused by ailments that should have easily been treated. And the deaf children’s suffering was acute. Unable to communicate with their family and community, they were often shunned and neglected. With no possibility of learning a means of communication, they were condemned to a life of isolation and rejection. Liesbeth had worked with deaf children in the camps of Ghana, from where she had recently returned along with some trained Liberian teachers who knew sign language and how to teach it.
‘Why don’t we start a proper school for these children? We have the teachers and we could build on the land we have been given beside the staff accommodation?’ Liesbeth asked me.
Just as we were starting to be clear that we should concentrate all our efforts on school feeding, and amid my repetitive urging to all that we must now stay very focused, I had been hit with another proposal that was impossible to ignore. This particular suffering simply seemed too great, and our ability to help too real, to pass it by.
So in the centre of the little Mary’s Meals compound, with our offices, warehouses and staff accommodation, is the Oscar Romero School for the Deaf. The Mary’s Meals staff in Tubmanburg surprised me when they gave it this name in honour of the archbishop in El Salvador who was assassinated in 1980 while celebrating Mass, because he would not stop speaking out against injustice and oppression of the poor – Julie had recently stuck a copy of Romero’s Prayer on our fridge at home and I had been deeply moved by the words. We had originally planned that this would be a residential school for forty but in the end it became home to sixty children, most of whom sleep there but return to their families in the villages as often as possible. But not all have families to return to.
Three days after we opened the new school some policemen from Monrovia arrived at the compound. They had with them a boy, about nine years old, dressed in a very scruffy T-shirt and shorts. They explained they had found him wandering alone on the city streets. Unable to hear or speak to them, they did not know what do with him and put him in prison for the night. Then they heard about our new school for the deaf – as the first of its kind in Liberia it was getting coverage in newspapers and on the radio – and so they had decided to take him to see us. We could only say yes when they asked if we could take him in. The young men learning carpentry at the deaf school were already working hard to make more bunk beds for us. We could find a place for him in the growing family. Of course the little boy could not tell us his name, or his story, but immediately began to take part enthusiastically in the sign-language lessons with the other kids. We called him Joseph and looked forward to the day he could tell us his real name and where he had come from – and where he wanted
to go.
Another new initiative born in Liberia, which ran parallel to and complemented Mary’s Meals, was our Backpack Project. In Malawi and Liberia we had begun to notice that many of the children coming to school because of the meals had nothing with which to learn – no pencils, jotters or any other basics. When we talked about this someone suggested that we adapt our ‘Shoebox Appeals’, through which children in Scotland had for many years been filling shoeboxes with gifts for impoverished children in Eastern Europe, in order to address this need. We began to ask schools to invite their pupils to fill school bags with basic educational items so we could ship these to Africa. The response from schools was overwhelming. The teachers loved the project because it allowed them to introduce a strong educational element about the places and people to which these gifts would be sent, and also because the filling of a backpack allowed a child to learn that they, personally, could do something to help a child in poverty. In Liberia, and then Malawi, the distribution of backpacks became the most joyous of events and another incentive for children to come to school.
‘You know, there are more possessions in one of these backpacks than an entire household would normally own here,’ Joseph, our Liberian Head of Operations observed as we bounced towards a village school with another truck of backpacks, part of a container-load recently arrived from Glasgow into the port in Monrovia. I marvelled once again at the excitement and unbridled joy of the kids who unpacked the backpacks in their classrooms, showing each other, with looks of disbelief, the exercise books, crayons, tennis balls and T-shirts that had just been given to them from someone they did not know in a faraway land. And later, when I visited some of their homes in the village, I did a little mental assessment and concluded that Joseph’s startling statement was certainly no exaggeration. In the years to come many people – including primary-school kids (and others), all over the UK, Ireland, Germany, Austria, Croatia and Italy – took part in this project, selecting items from our list and placing them with love in their backpacks. When I last checked we had sent over 400,000 of these bags to children in Liberia and Malawi.
The Shed That Fed a Million Children Page 15
