Shed That Fed a Million Children: The Extraordinary Story of Mary's Meals by MacFarlane-Barrow Magnus

Author:MacFarlane-Barrow, Magnus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2015-03-23T16:00:00+00:00

8

A Bumpy Road to Peace

Poverty in the world is a scandal. In a world where there is so much wealth it is unfathomable that there are so many hungry children, that there are so many children without an education, so many poor persons. Poverty today is a cry.

POPE FRANCIS

‘What did you eat this morning before school?’ we asked the next pupil on the bamboo bench.

‘Nothing,’ she replied, in the same way as all the others had before her.

‘And yesterday – what did you eat?’

‘Just rice.’

The answers were predictable. It seemed that each child, dressed in rags, ate ‘just rice’ or ‘just cassava’.

But then a small boy surprised us.

‘What did you eat this morning?’

‘Nothing.’

‘And yesterday?’

‘Nothing.’

We repeated the question, thinking he had misunderstood. Again he replied, more softly, ‘nothing’. He turned his head away, embarrassed, as tears began to form in his eyes. He didn’t want the other children to notice.

‘It’s true. I saw him near my house yesterday rooting around for wild yams,’ his teacher said to us quietly. We moved on quickly to question the next child, but the questions seemed pointless. We didn’t need to complete this survey to know that the children of Biffany, a village in Liberia, would benefit greatly from Mary’s Meals. Before we left the class I glanced back at the little boy who hadn’t eaten the day before and saw tears were still trickling silently down his face. I felt so ashamed.

Soon after establishing Mary’s Meals in Malawi we had developed a burning desire to put this project into practice in other countries as soon as possible. We could see it was transforming the lives of young people in Malawi and we were already stating boldly that our vision was ‘that every child receives one daily meal in their place of education’. If we were serious about this global vision, and we were, we needed to prove to ourselves – and others – that the same approach would work in other countries, cultures and situations where children missed school because of poverty.

It seemed obvious that Liberia should be next on our list. We had been working there for many years and had a close relationship with the long-suffering people of Bomi County. In addition, it would have been hard to identify a country in greater need of Mary’s Meals. The series of civil wars had at last ended in 2003 and the largest UN peacekeeping force in the world had just been deployed. There was a real opportunity to build a lasting peace but the people were suffering abject poverty and the children were hungry. Liberia had one of the lowest rates of primary-school enrolment in the world. If their young people could not access education and equip themselves to play a part in building a more prosperous Liberia, then other temptations would remain. Disenchanted, uneducated, impoverished young men (especially) would remain easy prey for future warlords looking for fighters who could be tempted by promises of power, status and loot. Meanwhile, in Bomi County, the children of the Gola were malnourished and dressed in rags.

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