To witness the horror of Arrayantu was traumatic. Even though we had come to help, and we certainly did over the coming months, I felt as if I had intruded in their unimaginable grief. Like others around us who had come to help there, I took photographs. But later, when I looked at them, I felt ashamed that while people screamed for their lost loved ones I had been there taking pictures. I decided then that sometimes, even when you felt pictures were essential to help with the raising of desperately needed money, it is better to leave your camera in your pocket.
After that hellish day in the village, having watched over a hundred bodies laid to rest in the gaping hole in the beach, without anyone there to identify or even count them, we headed on south. We arrived exhausted at an unlikely place called Velankanni, a vast shrine, with churches and huge basilicas. It was like an Indian version of Lourdes. I was incredulous. Father Joson explained that there was a tradition here that some time during the sixteenth century, Our Lady with her infant son appeared to a lower-caste Hindu boy who was carrying milk to a customer’s home. She asked him for some milk for her son and he gave her some. On reaching the customer’s home, the worried boy apologized for his lateness and tried to explain the reduced amount of milk by relating the incident that had occurred on his way. As he did so, the milk pot became full and started overflowing. The man, another Hindu, realized something miraculous had happened, and accompanied the boy back along the street and also saw Our Lady. Many other miracles began to occur there in the years that followed – most famously the saving of some Portuguese sailors whose boat was sinking in a violent storm off this coast and who, after praying to Our Lady, ran aground safely at this very spot. So convinced were they that they had been miraculously delivered from drowning, that they built a chapel in honour of Our Lady and she became venerated here by Christians and Hindus alike as ‘Arokia Matha’ – Mother of Good Health. During the celebration of her feast each year over a million pilgrims – both Christians and Hindus – gather in Velankanni, and each year hundreds of miraculous cures are reported.
Sleep did not come easily that night despite my exhaustion, and I prayed to Our Lady that she might intercede for those suffering at the hands of a storm much worse than any that afflicted those Portuguese sailors and that, in the same way she had used that small offering of milk, she might, too, use our little acts of kindness and make with them something beautiful.
11
Friends in High Places
Not what we give,
But what we share,
For the gift without the giver
Is bare.
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL
Lucy MacDonald, who was my PA for several years, had a wonderful knack of passing on messages to me in amusing ways. Her desk was in the ‘new shed’ next door to mine. Normally she was able to transfer incoming calls directly to my desk, but sometimes if something urgent came up when I was already on the line she found other ways to let me know. One day, in 2010, while I was deep in a telephone conversation, I glanced out of the window above my desk to see Lucy standing there with a big grin, holding a piece of cardboard on which she had written with a thick marker pen: ‘The Pope wants to meet you and the Queen will be there too.’
Pope Benedict was about to make an historic first state visit by a Pope to the UK, and he was to be received at the beginning of his trip by the Queen at Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh. I was thrilled to be among the guests invited to the historical meeting. And it became a very special day for Mary’s Meals when we were also invited by the Catholic Church in Scotland to be present on the streets of Edinburgh, among the crowds, in order to raise awareness of our work and collect donations. Many volunteers from all over Scotland, Ireland and England arrived to help us for the day. On a bright sunny morning, with the eyes of the world watching as the ‘popemobile’ made its way along Princes Street, blue Mary’s Meals T-shirts were visible everywhere among the crowd.
I had met Queen Elizabeth before. About a year previously, someone from Buckingham Palace had called me to say the Queen wished to invite me for lunch. I really was not entirely sure if one of my friends was playing an elaborate hoax until I received a written invitation some days later. A few weeks afterwards I turned up at the front gates of Buckingham Palace, approached one of those famous guards, in his red uniform and huge bearskin hat, and showed him my letter of invitation. He ushered me in, along with ten other guests, and before long I was being introduced to the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. The Queen surprised me by being so well informed about our work. She had a warm and sincere interest in Liberia and our work there, and shared some vivid and amusing memories of a visit she had made there some years previously. At lunch I found myself sitting beside the famous actress Joanna Lumley. She was incredibly gracious and kind to me, noticing that I was having a bit of difficulty with the correct order of assorted cutlery in front of me. Every now and then she would nudge me discreetly and point. I still don’t know why I was invited. I looked at the other nine guests round the table and could not figure out anything in particular that we all had in common. I asked one of the aides afterwards what the purpose of the lunch had been and he said, ‘No reason at all apart from the fact the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh like to invite people to lunch with them now and again.’
Afterwards my mum and Julie were desperate to know what I had eaten at lunch, but I could not remember a single item on the menu. I have no doubt it was delicious but I must have been so nervous it was entirely wasted on me. Ever since then, whenever I have been invited to do something in a social setting that makes me very nervous, I remind myself of that lunch and tell myself that I should now be able to take anything in my stride.
We continued to receive all sorts of wonderful invitations to meet and speak to groups of interested people all over the world. It became increasingly hard to keep track of how these invitations came about and sometimes I would arrive a little confused about why I was there and what exactly was expected of me. One winter’s evening I arrived on a delayed flight into Chicago and took a taxi through deep snow to the address in my diary. In a lovely warm and spacious apartment I found a crowd of people waiting for me, wine glasses in hand, perched on sofas and tabletops. I hardly had time to put down my suitcase and take off my jacket when my host (who I now remembered I had met at a previous event in this city) had introduced me to the assembly and asked me to speak about Mary’s Meals. Afterwards I had just begun to chat to some of the guests as they departed (I had kept them late due to my delayed flight) when the kindly host gave me an address on a slip of paper and told me she had vacated her apartment for the night so I could go and stay there. Once again I was humbled and embarrassed by an act of startling generosity, and before long my taxi was depositing me outside one of those landmark Chicago skyscrapers. I remember waking in the middle of that night and staring out of the window at a breathtaking view of thousands of twinkling lights against an ink-black sky, and for a few minutes wondering where in the world I was.
It was becoming harder to make judgements about which invitations to accept and which to decline. It was impossible to know who might be at one of these gatherings or how receptive their hearts would be.
In 2010, having said yes to a warm invitation from a friend of a friend, I travelled to meet another group of people I did not know – this time in New York – having no idea that I was about to encounter some people who would come to play a very special role in the Mary’s Meals story. The connection had been made by our friends in Miami, who had founded Mary’s Meals USA. They told me their friends, the Laffont family, would love me to come and meet them next time I was in New York, and so we arranged a date. Usually, if I had meetings in the New York area I would stay at a rambling old friary in Newark, New Jersey, that was home to the Franciscan Friars of the Renewal. One of the friars, Brother Francis, was an old friend of mine. He had lived in the Craig Lodge community as a young man just at the time when I began collecting aid for Bosnia-Herzegovina, and had often
accompanied me as I drove around Scotland with my truck to pick up donations of aid. He was the perfect co-worker for this task, being one of the tallest and strongest people I have ever met. It was like having a human crane in the back of the truck. For some years now he had been a Franciscan and it was a special blessing for me to stay in their community where I could enjoy some peaceful prayer time in the early mornings and evenings, before heading into New York for meetings. On this particular trip I was accompanied by Milona, and Brother Francis kindly offered to drive us into Manhattan, a place that neither of us were very familiar with, to the home of the Laffonts. They lived in a wonderful house on the Upper East Side and we were warmly welcomed into their home, which was packed full of their friends. We were perhaps a slightly unusual sight – Brother Francis at six foot ten inches tall in his Franciscan habit always tended to attract attention. Ana Laffont was perched on the stairs with some small children who had the excited expression of those avoiding bedtime, while their dad, Philippe, asked us to tell them the story of Mary’s Meals. After we did so there was a flurry of questions and we chatted to a number of the guests who wanted to get involved. Philippe had to leave, but before he did so he announced to the room that he would match any donation that any of them cared to make to Mary’s Meals. I began to realize that we were meeting some very unusual people, who had enormous resources at their disposal and hearts to match.
This was the beginning of a wonderful friendship with the Laffonts. Over the coming months and years Ana devoted an increasing amount of time to our work, eventually becoming the Chair of Mary’s Meals USA. She threw herself into learning about every aspect of Mary’s Meals, including trips to Africa, Dalmally and Medjugorje. And this deep understanding of all that was involved allowed her and Philippe to help us in very particular and thoughtful ways. They formed a deep appreciation that Mary’s Meals was first of all a grassroots movement – that this was an intrinsic part of our mission and that all who supported were of equal value no matter the type or size of donation. They loved this approach and wanted to help us protect it and help the movement grow by enabling us to tell the story in new ways to bigger audiences. In addition, given that they had enormous experience themselves of managing fast-growing organizations, they saw that the fish farmer from Argyll and his co-workers could use a bit of help in that area too.
I began speaking to Ana about an opportunity we had to make an amazing film about Mary’s Meals. For some time I had been a fan of a film-making company in Brooklyn called Grassroots. Ruth and I had watched one of their films a couple of years previously and commented that they would be the perfect people to make a film about Mary’s Meals one day. I had almost forgotten about them until Patty, who worked in our New Jersey office, asked me at the end of a call one day if she could finish work early to go and do an interview with an organization called Grassroots, who were making a film on a different topic.
‘Absolutely!’ I said. ‘As long as you mention Mary’s Meals to them! I have always wanted them to make a film about our work.’
To my amazement Patty came back to say that Grassroots already knew about our work and would love to make a documentary about Mary’s Meals. I began talking to them and realized that they were very serious indeed about this, but I also learnt that making such a film was not cheap and not something the Mary’s Meals low-cost approach could support. When I mentioned it to Ana and Philippe they immediately saw this as a wonderful way to help us tell the story of Mary’s Meals to a much bigger audience and they offered to fund the film.
So, a few weeks after those initial chats, I found myself with the Grassroots film crew on a whirlwind tour of Malawi, Kenya and India. In each of those places we spent time with children whose lives were being changed by Mary’s Meals. We wanted their stories to be the basis of the film. We did a lot of hard work to plan it all, setting up places to film and people to meet, but in the end the most amazing parts of the film were things we could never have set up.
In Eldoret, Kenya, we had organized to film in a rubbish dump where many children spent their days scavenging for items to sell to recyclers, sniffing glue to stave off the pain of hunger. We were providing school meals in Eldoret and could see this was helping many children leave the streets and go to school for the first time. We arrived at 5 a.m. at the dump and began filming. As well as children there were many adults, some obviously high on glue, and many bore wounds on their faces and limbs. It was a frightening place. As they filmed, a crowd surrounded them – some friendly, others not. At one point Cliff, one of the crew, called over to me.
‘Magnus, there is a small boy here you should meet.’
He led over a little boy called Muski, perhaps eight years old, who was saying over and over again, ‘I want to go to school. I want to go to school …’
I talked to our Kenyan colleagues, asking their advice about the best thing to do.
‘Well, we can take him to a school here and he will receive Mary’s Meals,’ said Abel, with his hand on the boy’s shoulder, ‘but we really need to find somewhere for him to live.’
‘There is a children’s home on the other side of the city,’ said Charles. ‘Who knows, they might be able to take him in.’
Before long we were driving across the city with Muski and found the home, with a neat, brightly painted play area outside. A couple of us went in and introduced ourselves. When the people who ran the home learnt we were from Mary’s Meals they became very animated.
‘Oh, you are from Mary’s Meals! We have always wanted to meet someone from Mary’s Meals. You have started providing meals in the school across the street from us. All the children who live with us here go there and so are now eating every day at school, thank God! We want to thank you with all our hearts!’
I felt this was a really good moment to tell them about the little boy in the car outside.
‘Yes, we have space. We can take him – we are happy to!’
Thus it was that Muski’s life was transformed in front of our eyes. I couldn’t believe it when I glanced at my watch and noticed it was still only 10 a.m. After Abel and Charles had sorted out arrangements at the home, and ensured we could check up on his welfare, we invited Muski to hang out with us for the day as we continued to film at schools in the area. By the end of the morning he was behind the camera. I even saw him laugh for the first time. By midday, we realized we had been working for eight hours without eating and called in at a restaurant by the roadside. It happened to be rather formal with white tablecloths and suited waiters who looked distinctly unimpressed as we walked in with the dirty little boy in rags, who did not smell at all good. We took him to the bathroom and scrubbed him as best we could before sitting down to some chicken and chips. At one point during lunch one of us asked Muski when his birthday was. Of course he didn’t know.
‘Well, today is your birthday!’ we all told him together.
The film that Grassroots produced, Child 31, is a wonderful, moving representation of Mary’s Meals. It has become the most effective tool I have ever had to help us tell the story and explain what Mary’s Meals really is. We encouraged supporters all over the world to organize screenings of Child 31 and the response was amazing. Over 1,300 people showed up for the ‘premiere’ at our Open Day in Glasgow. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown, who had by then been appointed United Nations Special Envoy for Global Education, attended the event and introduced the film. I had got to know him a little and was struck by his genuine long-held passion to help eradicate extreme poverty. As we chatted before going on stage in Glasgow, he asked me to tell him more about the work of Mary’s Meals. Afterwards he made an extremely powerful speech, ending it by saying:
‘Ensuring every child has the opportunity to go to school and learn is a long-standing passion of mine. Education breaks the cycle of poverty and unlocks better health and job prospects.
‘As I travel throughout the world on this mission, as the UN Envoy for Global Education, I don’t need a calling card. I
will just leave a copy of Child 31 and show what can be done to encourage children into education.’
Over 600 screenings of the film, which we had subtitled in seven languages, were organized in many different countries. In many European countries, as well as the USA, Canada, the United Arab Emirates, Australia, Liberia, Malawi and India, people gathered to watch the film in all sorts of venues – cinemas, palaces, sitting rooms, schools and universities – while in several countries the film was broadcast on TV. I had hoped this film would allow me to cut down on travelling to give talks, but that was naive – the initial screenings provided opportunities to speak to many new audiences. Given how often I watched the film in venues far from home, the fact that three of my own children – Bethany, Toby and Anna – appear fleetingly in the film was a special little treat for me at times. Grassroots had filmed at a fund-raising event in our local Dalmally primary school and as there are only about forty children in the school, it is not surprising my children and their friends appeared in the final edit. Often, at the part when Anna, among a crowd of classmates, smiles and waves at the camera, I would surprise the person beside me in the audience by nudging them and saying proudly, ‘That’s my daughter by the way!’
When the film was aired on a national TV station in Croatia their website crashed as it became inundated with people wishing to donate, and over the following months Mary’s Meals doubled its income in that country. Everywhere our work grew like never before because of Child 31, and to this day it continues to move thousands of people to help. Various celebrities, including Celine Dion, provided sincere video endorsements after watching the film. Annie Lennox said:
The Shed That Fed a Million Children Page 20
