13
Generation Hope
The philosophy of the school room in one generation will be the philosophy of government in the next.
ABRAHAM LINCOLN
Just before the sun rose over the hills to the east of Gay’s home, we began our journey to Edward’s village. It was June 2014 and I had not met him again since our only encounter twelve years previously, when the fourteen-year-old had sat beside his dying mother and answered my question about his hopes and ambitions: ‘I would like to have enough food to eat and I would like to be able to go to school one day.’
I had been repeating those words that sparked this mission of Mary’s Meals, ever since, to thousands of audiences all over the world. They have appeared in renowned newspapers and been broadcast in many languages. And, strangely, I have never tired of repeating them. Even on the crazy occasions when I have given seven or eight talks in one day, they feel fresh and vital each time.
Gay was driving and I felt very glad she was with me. It was she who had managed to arrange this meeting and who, indirectly, had been responsible for my first meeting with Edward too. In fact, she had been responsible for just about every amazing thing that had happened these twelve extraordinary years in Malawi. My oldest son, Calum, who was making his first trip to Malawi (I had always promised my children I would take them here for their first visit when they were sixteen years old), was also in the car and Gay and I regaled him with tales about the early days of Mary’s Meals as we drove north under skies clear and blue. Gay’s husband, David, who featured in many of our stories, had died in 2010, but not before he had delighted us all by joining us for a Mary’s Meals meeting in Medjugorje. During that week he chose to climb the steep rocky path up Krizevac, the Hill of the Cross, with Gay, where together they had a very deep experience of grace and healing. One year later, to the day, while laughing in Gay’s arms as he arrived home at their front door, he had died of a massive heart attack. As we continued our drive I had a strong sense of the passing of the years and together we prayed the joyful mysteries of the rosary together.
Sometimes, after I gave public talks, people asked me what had happened to Edward and his brothers and sisters. The question pained me because the truth was that I had no idea what had become of them. I had met him during a whirlwind tour of villages during the famine of 2002, in a fleeting visit to a village near Balaka, and it was not in this area that we began serving the meals. In fact Mary’s Meals only reached Balaka nearly ten years later. At that point we had tried to find Edward and been told he had left the area. I presumed I would never see him again, but a few weeks before this visit I had asked Gay Russell to try one more time. She talked to the Italian priest at Balaka, Father Gamba, who had first taken us to meet Edward’s family, and showed him a photograph that we had taken in 2002 of the children with their dying mother. To my amazement I received word back from Gay that this time they had found them, back in the very place we first met. The mother had died a few months after our meeting, but some of the children still lived there, and Edward, now married with a child, lived in a village only a few miles away. Father Gamba offered to set up a meeting with him.
It was appropriate that this day happened to be the feast of the Visitation and early that morning, before setting off on our journey, I had felt challenged when reading the day’s scripture passage.
‘Do not let your love be a pretence,’ St Paul had written to the Romans. ‘Work for the Lord with untiring effort and with great earnestness of spirit … If any of the saints are in need you must share with them … Rejoice with those who rejoice and be sad with those in sorrow. Treat everyone with equal kindness; never be condescending but make real friends with the poor.’
‘Make real friends with the poor.’ That was difficult sometimes. The barriers between the rich and the poor, between the educated and uneducated, between the Malawian and a person from a country that had once made them part of their empire, often felt impossible to break through. As we drove towards Balaka I was asking myself about my relationship with the poor. And part of me was not looking forward to meeting Edward because I knew, that for him, Mary’s Meals had come too late.
Father Gamba’s long hair and beard had grown white since I last met him. My previous brief meeting with him all those years ago had left me with a vague memory of someone who looked like Jesus. The Italian missionary priest was now much older than the crucified Jesus, but his smiling eyes and crinkled tanned face more than ever exuded holiness. It was a Saturday morning and before we went on to our appointment with Edward he led us to the nearby parish youth club where hundreds of kids met every weekend to play games, dance and sing, and also to do works of charity in their local community. As we arrived the children clapped and sang their welcome.
‘Keep the fire burning!!’ was their slogan and they sang it loudly to us, before we chatted with them for a while. They told us about some houses they had helped build for destitute families in the town and about a very remote village on a nearby mountain, two hours from the nearest road, which they had started to visit with Father Gamba. They were helping the children there to set up a youth club like their own and were building a nursery with them for the younger kids. I asked them if any of them knew about Mary’s Meals and every child raised their hand, laughing and saying they ate Mary’s Meals every day in their various schools. Before we left they asked earnestly if we could try and bring Mary’s Meals to the village on the mountain. They explained they would visit there again the following Sunday, the feast of Pentecost, and asked if we would come. I told them we would try.
We travelled on from there on dusty tracks to meet Edward. We parked outside a simple home by the road, outside which some teenage girls and young women sat with babies and children around them. Some of the children looked malnourished. One small child lay under a blanket shivering with a fever. We said hello and two of them shyly introduced themselves as Angelina and Maya, Edward’s younger sisters and called over their youngest brother Chinsinsi to say hello. They pulled out some chairs for us to sit on outside the house and they explained that the parish had built this home for them as they were all orphans. Various people greeted us and after a few minutes a skinny young man arrived and shook my hand. He frowned anxiously.
‘I’m Edward,’ he said after a moment of awkward silence, taking me by surprise because he looked absolutely nothing like the Edward I had in my mind. He had a sad tired face with a prominent nose. He also seemed nervous and I guessed he was unsure and perhaps fearful about why we had asked to meet him.
I asked him if he remembered our meeting twelve years earlier and he said that of course he did. He led me to a neighbouring little mud-brick home where that meeting had taken place. I was amazed to see it standing just as I remembered it. It had not looked like it had been built to last so long. I began to talk to Edward about his life.
‘Since my mother died I have only had problems and because I could never go to school each one of those problems is doubled.’ He looked dejected and perhaps a little angry too.
I asked him about his life, hoping he would say something happier.
‘I grow some maize. But it is difficult.’
‘How was your harvest?’ I asked him.
‘I got four bags of maize.’
‘How long will that last you and your family?’
He shrugged and thought about it for some time. ‘Between two and three months, I think,’ he finally answered, but seemed unsure and stressed by the question. ‘But I am worried about my brothers and sisters. They don’t have enough to eat here either.’
I turned to Maya and Chinsinsi, the two who still attended a local primary school. ‘Do you receive Phala at your school?’ I asked them, having already checked that Mary’s Meals was now being served in this district.
They smiled broadly for the first time since I had arrived. ‘Yes, every day we get Phala at school!’
Maya explained she was just finishing primary school and had been s
itting exams.
I asked Edward if he had heard of Mary’s Meals.
‘Yes, they are a group who are feeding children in schools around here.’
And so I explained to him the story of Mary’s Meals and the part our first meeting had played. I told him how the meals were not just being served around here, but to children all over the world. While I talked, his wife arrived with their two-year-old child.
‘This is Blessing,’ said Edward, proudly holding his son. And now he was smiling for the first time too.
‘Will Blessing go to school when he is older?’ I asked.
‘Yes, of course I want him to go to school. Every father wants what is best for his child. Every parent wants their child to go to school,’ he replied with feeling in his voice.
‘And at the school in your village, is there Mary’s Meals also?’
He smiled at me. ‘Yes, there is. Blessings will receive Phala there every day.’
There were many thoughts going through my mind and a jumble of emotions in my heart as we drove in silence back to Blantyre: sadness at the poverty of Edward’s life, joy that the lives of his youngest siblings and son would be helped by Mary’s Meals, and a nagging guilt that I had been using his words all these years while he continued to suffer in the very trap we were trying to help people escape from. But more than anything I felt a desire, more intense than ever, to reach more children with Mary’s Meals as soon as possible. The glaring contrast between Edward’s life and that of Veronica, who I had met the previous day, was also in my mind.
We had gone to meet her at her little brick house in Chilomoni, the township on the edge of Blantyre, whose children had been the very first to receive Mary’s Meals twelve years ago. We walked between market stalls teeming with colourful life, silver fish dried on tabletops, multicoloured flip-flops hung in bundles and translucent pink tomatoes neatly stacked into pyramids. Some ladies sat among a pile of black charcoal, bagging it for sale. Veronica was waiting for us at her door, wearing a colourful dress. She welcomed us with a huge smile and invited us into her simple, tidy home, explaining that her two sisters, who raised her, were out at work. She was eighteen years old and had just completed secondary school, an incredible feat for a child from this community who had grown up without the support of parents. We began chatting and asked her about her childhood.
‘I lost my father when I was eleven months old and then my mother when I was nine years old,’ she said, looking at her hands. ‘Sometimes I would go the whole week without food. I was weak. Back then my brothers and sisters weren’t working and we used to share the food between us.
‘Then I got the porridge in 2005, from Standard 5 onwards. I was doing my best before the porridge, but the food improved my performance. When I was going to class I was full in my stomach so I was able to concentrate and listen as I had more energy than before.’
She brightened and became animated when we started to enquire about her life now. ‘A lot of my old schoolfriends are married now. But I want to concentrate on my education because I have suffered a lot and I think education is the only way out. So that’s why I work hard.’
And an enormous grin spread across her face as she told us some very special news. ‘I have been selected to go to the Polytechnic University!’
‘That is incredible!’ I yelped. ‘Amazing! What will you study?’
‘Business and education. I am not sure if I want to work in a bank or be a teacher!’ she laughed, unable to contain her excitement at the life unfolding in front of her.
Veronica’s effervescent optimism and Edward’s gloomy toil were on my mind, the following day, when I joined a very different meeting in the atmospheric upper room of Mandela House in Blantyre. Believed to be the oldest standing building in Malawi, it was built by the Moir brothers from Glasgow in 1892 as the base for their African Lakes Company. While the ground floor is now an art gallery and restaurant, the upper floor has become a library and conference room, the walls of which are adorned with faded historic photographs and slightly uncomfortable reminders of a Scottish-flavoured colonial past.
Anastasia Msosa, the Chief Justice of Malawi (and the first female in this country to hold the post), apologized for arriving a little late. We were amazed she was able to come at all considering the country was in the midst of a post-election crisis, with allegations of serious vote-rigging by the outgoing president delaying the announcement of a new president. Anastasia took her seat beside the Honourable Justin Malawezi, a slightly built, bespectacled elderly man, who, as the former vice-president of Malawi also had some deep insights into the current political situation. Other trustees round the table included David Haworth, the former Managing Director of Illovo Sugar, one of the largest companies in the country and, of course, Gay Russell, who has been attending these meetings with me since the very first ones that took place in her own living room. Hitesh Anadkat, a leading member of the Hindu Asian business community in Malawi, had sent his apologies for being unable to attend this time.
We had a busy agenda to get through before lunch, starting with reports from our new Country Director Chris MacLullich and our Head of Operations Panji Kajani. We noted the fact that Mary’s Meals was now serving nearly 700,000 children every day in Malawi – nearly 26 per cent of the primary-school-age population – and discussed the best ways for us to engage with a new government in order to encourage them to support our work and eventually provide an extensive school-feeding programme themselves. The government in recent years had adopted a policy of universal school feeding and begun to provide meals in a small number of schools, while stating the impact of Mary’s Meals in their country was one of the main catalysts that prompted this. While all of us round the table were greatly encouraged that the government had recognized that school meals were essential, we also recognized that the meagre resources at their disposal, and the fact that their education and health budgets were already horribly short of the requirements for basic needs, meant the Malawian government was very unlikely to provide meals on a large scale any time soon. We discussed how we could support them by sharing our skills and methodologies while always retaining our own independence. Meanwhile, we reconfirmed plans to continue expanding Mary’s Meals to schools on our waiting lists as fast as our funding would allow. Please God, one day, the government here will be in a position to take over our programme and make us redundant in Malawi – that would be success for us, leaving us to concentrate our efforts in other areas of need – but we agreed that until that becomes a realistic prospect we will continue to work as hard as ever to reach the next hungry schools on our list.
Next we learnt that we are having much success in encouraging the school communities to begin tree-planting projects. Deforestation is a huge problem in Malawi, and while we had long been committed to using the most fuel-efficient stoves in the school kitchens, we also wanted the school communities, who are responsible for the provision of their own firewood, to plant trees so that their source of fuel would become self-replenishing. We then heard an update on the imminent launch of Mary’s Meals in neighbouring Zambia. We had travelled to Zambia a few days previously – my first visit to that country – and had visited schools around Chipata, near the Malawian border, which would be the first to receive the meals. It was clearly an area of very great need with large numbers of local children not enrolled in school. I had been surprised to see just how near those villages are to schools which are already receiving Mary’s Meals on the Malawian side of the border, and was amazed to learn that Zambian children were currently migrating across that border each day to attend those schools where they would receive a meal. Chris and Panji told us they were confident that the new Mary’s Meals programme in Zambia would stop this cross-border traffic.
Justin Malawezi then explained to us that this area of Zambia could just as easily have been part of Malawi. On both sides of the border the people are Chewa, as are most of the people in Malawi, including himself. He is a special advisor to the
King of the Chewa and has deep knowledge of the traditional structures that are in some ways at least as important for us to understand as the current political ones. Justin’s insights and informative comments in this area were always something I looked forward to at these meetings.
‘I am happy that Mary’s Meals is expanding according to the Chewa kingdom rather than the modern-day borders of Malawi!’ he observed with a smile. ‘Maybe we should start in Mozambique next! There is a large Chewa population there too, you know!’ he laughed.
We finished the final points on our agenda – a review of our Under-6 centres, current food prices, currency fluctuations – before heading our separate ways.
During the meeting I had been a little distracted by the invitation we had been given by the youth club to climb that mountain on Pentecost Sunday and to meet their friends on its summit. It was an invitation that proved impossible to resist and so, very early the following Sunday, Calum and I met Father Gamba and his youth group at the foot of Chaoni Mountain. We were joined by Chris MacLullich and his Liberian wife, Mercy, along with her six-year-old son Tony. The well-worn, red path climbed very steeply through the forested slopes of the mountain. The members of the youth club, clambering with us, carried various bags and parcels – gifts for their friends who lived 3,000 feet above. We passed some girls, perhaps twelve years old, resting beside huge bundles of firewood which they were carrying up the path. As we climbed higher I began to notice that those we passed did not reply with the standard response when we said ‘Muli Bwanji’, the common Chichewa greeting of ‘How are you?’ Father Gamba explained that those living on the mountain were of the Yao tribe with their own language. Over streams and round enormous boulders we climbed, until above the forested slopes we found ourselves amid neat fields of maize and sweet potatoes and clusters of banana trees. The views across the plains beneath us were exhilarating. After two hours of hard climbing we reached the plateau on top of the mountain where we began to find clusters of houses. A group of little children who had been pounding maize outside their home stopped and stared open-mouthed at us as we waved to them on the way past. Eventually we arrived at a bigger village with a church, from which we could hear drumming and beautiful harmonized songs of praise. People were already arriving for Mass, among them several elderly Muslims, wearing prayer caps, who took their seats at the back of the church. It seemed appropriate on this feast of Pentecost, the day when the Holy Spirit had allowed people divided by many different languages to understand each other, to be sitting in a church beside my Scottish, Liberian and Chewa friends, listening to Mass in a language that I had never even heard or spoken before. And as always the Mass was very familiar and very new at the same time.
The Shed That Fed a Million Children Page 24
