The Shed That Fed a Million Children: The Mary’s Meals Story

‘What would you do,’ they asked, ‘if you came across evidence that a product sold by a company, who had a very substantial advertising account with this magazine – say a chemical used for getting rid of parasites on salmon – was having a hugely detrimental effect on wild shellfish in the area?’

‘Of course I would write a factually correct, well-researched article, exposing this. It would be an important story to tell,’ I said with some relish, not for one second thinking that, to them, my answer was hopelessly naive. But then I noticed them looking at each other, one with raised eyebrow, the other smirking. Too late, I realized that my fantasies of writing award-winning journalism as a weapon of truth and justice were not necessarily compatible with writing for a Scottish fish-farming magazine. Julie was waiting for me outside and when I told her what had happened we laughed so much, realizing that our hearts had never really been in it. In fact our hearts were not really in anything outside of the work we were already doing. And in Julie I had a fiancée who not once, ever, expressed any concern about our future financial security or well-being.

However, we were running out of money. It was a year since I had given up my job. We needed to make some choices. The board of trustees proposed that I start to take a small salary so that this work, which was growing steadily, could continue. Eventually, after much discussion, thought and prayer, I accepted. It was a very difficult decision. This had not been part of the original plan, and to take even a small portion of the money given us in order to support myself made me feel very uncomfortable. We wanted our organization, and still do to this day, to be as low-cost and as reliant on volunteers as possible. But the alternative was for me to go back to another job and for us to wind down the organization, just at a time when more and more people were supporting us and encouraging us to go on. And one small salary represented a very small percentage of the value of donations. So I accepted the offer and I am very glad I did.

We continued, relentlessly, to look for the most effective ways to deliver the aid that people kept entrusting us with. I was happy that our new bigger lorry had reduced the costs of transport significantly, but now I became bothered that we were driving back across Europe on each return trip with a huge empty trailer. I began asking people if there was anything someone would pay us to carry back from Eastern Europe to help offset costs. Around this time I came to know Sir Tom Farmer, perhaps Scotland’s best-known entrepreneur and founder of Kwik Fit, the enormous car tyre and exhaust-fitting company. He had, years previously, visited Mum and Dad at our retreat centre in Dalmally and been very kind in supporting them. It turned out that at this time he was importing lots of tyres to Scotland from Slovenia and northern Italy. He was happy for us to carry some of these as ‘return loads’ back to his Kwik Fit depots and to pay us the going rate. Sir Tom became a great friend and mentor over the next few years, giving me his time whenever I asked, and some hugely important words of wisdom.

‘Target your values, don’t value your targets,’ he told me when I mentioned growth figures or ambitious plans. On other occasions, when I talked of new ideas, he would refocus me by saying, ‘Magnus, just stick to the knitting!’

The return loads worked wonderfully well and, in time, through agents, we also began to arrange other cargo (refrigerators, flat-pack furniture, etc.) that we could carry back. To do this we had to obtain an Operator’s Licence to run a haulage company, which necessitated me doing some study on international haulage and passing an exam. The return loads worked really well in offsetting much of the cost of transport, but before long I realized that I was now spending most of my time running a trucking company. I felt that was not what I should be doing with my time. So I began to think about it the other way round. I observed on our journeys that there were lots of Eastern European trucks delivering goods to the UK. They must also have empty trailers to fill on their return journeys? And so that is what we began to do. Now that we had established, trusted partners, like the Family Centre in Zagreb, we could load a Croatian truck in Scotland and pay them a very reasonable cost to transport it for us. This became our preferred way of working, allowing us to concentrate on raising awareness of our work, collecting aid and thanking our donors. It also enabled us to cope with the ever-increasing scale. By the peak of our aid deliveries, during the Kosovo crisis in 1999, we were loading a 40-tonne truck almost every day for two consecutive months, from four Glasgow warehouses. We asked a radio station in Glasgow to make an appeal for more volunteers, and over just one weekend 500 people registered at our warehouses to help pack and sort the goods. These trucks took the aid by road to Split where, with the help of the redoubtable Dr Marijo, our trusted friend in Croatia, it was transferred to ships for the final leg of the journey into Albania, where huge numbers of refugees from Kosovo were arriving.

Also, the kind of aid we sent evolved as we went on. As stability returned to certain areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, some refugees began returning to homes that had been damaged and looted. An urgent need grew for the things they required to start life again. Now our trucks began to carry cutlery, kitchen utensils and tools.

One group of people who were grappling with the possibility of a return home were good friends of ours. They were Bosnian Muslim refugees living in Glasgow. They had fled their hometown, Bosanski Petrovac, which lay in a Serb-controlled part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1992, and eventually arrived by chance in Glasgow, having been evacuated by the UN. It was there, when they began coming to our warehouse to volunteer their time to help prepare the aid donations for shipment to their homeland, that we got to know them. They became part of the ‘team’ of warehouse volunteers and told us that being able to do this gave their broken lives a purpose. Not only were they struggling to learn English and adapt to a foreign culture; they were also finding life on the seventeenth floor of a block of flats in the city very different from their former rural existence. There were twelve of them, all closely related, and sometimes we invited them up to visit us in Dalmally where they would enjoy barbecues with us. Suad, and his wife Zlata, who had a young son, were about our age and we became friends. As their English improved, they wanted to tell us more about what had happened to them. They explained that before the war their village had been home to Serbs and Muslims who had lived peacefully together. Many of their neighbours were Serbian whom they had known all their lives.

‘We were just working in the fields like normal,’ Suad explained. ‘Shooting just started. There was tension in the village. We all knew what was happening in other parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But even one week before we had been invited to a party at the house of our Serb neighbours. The shots were coming from near that neighbour’s house, beside our field. My father and my brother Mersad fell. They were bleeding. I was hit too.’ He pointed to the scars on his withered arm.

‘My brother Mersad took a long time to die. He kept shouting “Suad, help me,” but I couldn’t. I was all bloody too.’

‘We were watching it all happen from our house,’ Zlata said quietly. ‘We wanted to run out to them in the field but the Serb was shooting from some bushes nearby. He would have killed us. Edin, Mersad’s son, was ten. He kept on trying to run out to his dad and we had to hold him back. Eventually when it became dark Suad managed to crawl home.’

The next day they squeezed on to overcrowded buses provided by the UN to evacuate them to Zagreb. They were shot at by Serbs and endured an appalling journey in the heat, without food or water.

‘I had to use my shirt as a nappy for Zlatan – he was still a baby then,’ Zlata told us through tears.

By 1995, the fortunes of war began to change and the Serbs had largely lost control of that part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. We were able to begin sending trucks of aid into the city of Bihac, which had endured a horrific three-year siege, and then to our friends’ hometown of Bosanski Petrovac. Suad began to receive messages from people who had already returned home to their town, urging them to come back too. And so, despite having no savings, no paid employment opportunities there, no assurance of safety, only a badly damaged home and some fields that might now have mines in them, they decided to go home. And we decided to go with them. We filled a large truck with all the belongings they had accumulated in Glasgow, as well as various other goods and tools to help them begin their lives again from scratch. Meanwhile, we had also been donated a minibus for a psychiatric hospital in Croatia to which we regularly delivered aid, and so we formed a plan for me to drive the group home in that minibus and then leave it at the hospital before flying home. The BBC heard of our plan and decided to make a documentary about our journey. And so, for the benefit of the cameramen, we waved goodbye to the bulging truck as it departed ahead of us from our Glasgow warehouse, and climbed into our bus. The group ranged from a two-year-old to an elderly granny. We headed south towards the ferry and Europe.

On arrival in Belgium we stopped at the customs post to show our passports. The police studied the Bosnians’ papers and were clearly unhappy. They asked questions and made phone calls. They told us the papers were valid for entry into Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina only, but not for transiting the European countries in between. They decided to deport us back to the UK. We also asked questions and made phone calls, but to no avail, and later we found ourselves travelling back on the boat to England. I realized the Bosnians had no homes to return to in Glasgow and that their belongings were already well on their way to Bosnia-Herzegovina, along with the BBC film crew. I phoned Julie to check what money we had left in our bank account and what flights from Heathrow would cost. We calculated that we had just enough to fly the whole group to Zagreb. So I drove them to Heathrow Airport from the ferry terminal and put them on their plane. I then headed south again, catching my third cross-Channel ferry in two days, and pointed my bus towards Zagreb. By now I could drive to our various destinations in the former Yugoslavia without needing a map, and this time it was pleasing to see just how quickly I was transiting countries compared to the slower pace of progress I had become used to in the lorry. Meanwhile Julie arranged for the Bosnian families to be met by Marijo on their arrival in Zagreb, who took them home to stay with them while waiting for me to catch up. When I finally did arrive the next day, they all climbed back in the bus for the final leg of their emotional journey over the border into Bosnia-Herzegovina. It amazed me, when I finally watched the documentary broadcast by the BBC about this journey, to see how skilfully they pieced together the footage so there was no hint of the deportations and flights that had occurred in between the Glasgow departure and the arrival into Bosnia-Herzegovina!

After the usual checking of papers at the Bosnian border we were finally waved through. As we entered Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zlata broke the silence with a cry.

‘We are no longer refugees!’

Everyone in the bus was crying. And the sobs grew louder when we finally reached Bosanski Petrovac, which was in ruins. Every building was covered in bullet holes and many houses had been reduced to pitiful piles of rubble.

The welcome they received from dear friends they had not seen for over three years was full of raw emotion. There was so much news to exchange. So many terrible things experienced that they had never had a chance to discuss and to try and understand. So many changes, too, in their old town. The Serbs were now gone. The town was now Muslim in a way it never had been before. A new mosque was being built even while many of the houses still lay in ruins. For Muslims like those I had just arrived with, their religion had not been something they previously practised. In fact I had met some young Muslims during the war who told me they never even knew they were Muslim before the war. Only their surname denoted their religion and sometimes sealed their fate. Bosnanski Petrovac might be home, and their hearts rejoiced at being back, but in some ways it was an alien land. I felt a little awkward. These encounters and exchanges that I found myself in the midst of were so personal and intimate that I wanted to leave them to work through it without me, however they could.

I left Bosanski Petrovac very early the next morning, leaving Suad and his family sleeping in their own home. I should have felt elated, but my drive was not a comfortable one. I travelled for many miles through a countryside and villages utterly devoid of people. Wild dogs, the only other sign of life, roamed amid the rubble and rubbish. This was part of the krajina, an area occupied by the Serbs for most of the war. They had only recently been defeated here and I became increasingly scared as I drove through this wasteland on my own. I began to doubt whether those in Bosnanski Petrovac, only recently returned themselves, had been well-informed when they advised me it would be safe to drive this route to Croatia and the Adriatic coast, where the hospital was awaiting the minibus. And given the lack of road signs, and any other way of checking I was on the right road, I began to fear I would drive into an area where I should not be welcome. The hours went past without seeing a human. As well as fear, a new overwhelming loathing for war and its futility rose in me. I wondered what would become of all the Serbs who had now been forced to flee the empty houses by the side of road and the villages to which they had belonged for generations. It was clear there were no winners in this war, only people taking their turn to lose in very horrible ways.

Eventually, I did find my way out of the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina and that same evening I found myself in a different world, eating delicious fish by the sparkling Adriatic with some friends from the hospital, who rejoiced over their new bus.

It was only on the flight home that I remembered our bank account. The £4,200 we had spent on plane tickets to Zagreb had left us with almost nothing. The aid donations would be piling up. I began to wonder how we would pay some outstanding bills and find a way to finance the next delivery. When I arrived back, a smiling Julie could not wait to tell me her news.

‘A cheque arrived this morning from a priest in Ireland. We don’t know him. He doesn’t want a thank-you letter. He wants this to remain anonymous,’ she said, her voicing cracking with emotion. ‘It is for £4,200.’

4

Suffer Little Children

First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

MAHATMA GANDHI

It took me a long time to decipher how the jumble of numbers on my train ticket related to the carriages, compartments and bunk beds of a night train pulling out of Bucharest railway station, bound for Transylvania, just before midnight, on a very cold and dark April night in 1998. When I eventually found the right compartment I was dismayed to discover it full of young Romanian soldiers drinking beer. They did not look particularly happy when I entered and I felt a little intimidated. It took lengthy persuasion and much pointing at my ticket (they didn’t have English and I had no Romanian) before a young, well-built man with a shaven head gave up my bed upon which he had been sitting. As the train chugged through an area of bleak-looking high-rise flats in the suburbs of the capital city, one of the soldiers surprised me by offering me a swig of his beer. I accepted and just as I was handing the bottle back the window of our carriage smashed inwards. A small rock landed on the floor between the bunks and shattered glass sprinkled the cabin. The reaction of my travel companions suggested this was just an act of random vandalism, but as the cold night air rushed into our compartment, and we did our best to snuggle under our meagre blankets, I questioned the wisdom of travelling to this country I knew so little about. But then I remembered the email that had led me here. I had received it, out of the blue, a few weeks earlier from an American lady called Kristl Killian. She introduced herself as a volunteer who was working with children in Romania who had been abandoned in hospitals in the city of Targu Mures, and she was making a desperate plea for us to send basic supplies.

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