- Mary's meals
Mary's Meals is an offshoot of the charity [http://www.marysmeals.org/story_behind.html Scottish International Relief] . It began in 2002 and has grown from its first feeding operation of 200 children in Malawi, to a world-wide campaign, providing free school meals in hundreds of schools and feeding over 330,000 children daily.
Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, the charity's founder, claims that it is possible to combat and defeat world hunger and encourage education by the simple method of providing school meals.
High profile supporters of Mary's Meals include the entrepreneur and Dragon's Den star [http://http://www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/editors-choice/2008/06/06/small-scottish-charity-could-make-big-difference-to-african-poverty-says-dragons-den-star-duncan-bannatyne-86908-20596556/ Duncan Bannatyne] and the philanthropist [http://http://www.sundaymail.co.uk/lifestyle/jobs-in-scotland/2008/01/20/sweet-sir-charity-78057-20291095/ Sir Tom Farmer]
The greater part of the Mary's Meals project happens in Malawi where over 300,000 children are now receiving Mary's Meals, a daily meal of 'likuni phala' a vitamin-laced porridge of Malawi-grown maize, cooked by volunteer mothers at the children's schools.
Mary's Meals now helps feed children in countries from Haiti to Ukraine, Burma-Thailand to Liberia.
History
Mary’s Meals began in 1992 during the Balkan conflict, when Magnus and Fergus MacFarlane Barrow organised a local appeal for blankets and food. They filled a jeep with aid and delivered their cargo to [http://www.medjugorje.org/ Medjugorje] in Bosnia.
The brothers, aged 25 and 27, returned to Scotland expecting to resume work as fish farmers, but in their absence their parents’ garage had been filled with more donations.
Magnus took a ‘gap year’, to deliver the aid for as long as it was needed and provided, and has never gone back to his old job. The donations didn’t stop – they still haven’t – so the project was registered as a charity, then named Scottish International Relief ( [http://www.nidos.org.uk/directory/details.asp?id=128] SIR).
SIR’s work soon extended to Romania, where it built and maintained homes for abandoned children, and Liberia, helping refugees by setting up mobile clinics. While SIR has expanded recently, it is still involved in all of its original projects.
On a visit to Malawi in 2002, Magnus met a boy whose plight led to a new focus and our main area of work today. Lying on the floor of her hut, the boy’s mother was dying of AIDS, surrounded by her six children.
Magnus asked the oldest son what he hoped for in life, and he said: “to have enough to eat and go to school one day.” The request struck a chord, and led to the evolution of SIR into Mary’s Meals at it exists today.
Projects
One of Mary's Meals' most high profile projects is the [http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=UdWvWVMdSkw Backpack Project] , which encourages school children to donate their old school backpacks and fill them with school materials such as notebooks, pencils, flip-flops and T-shirts, to send to children in countries such as Liberia, Uganda and Malawi. The backpack project was the subject of recent TV coverage through Five's [http://news.five.tv/news.php?news=754 Britain's Kindest Kids] competition, and an STV feature on Holyrood High School pupils' visit to Malawi.
References
* [http://www.marysmeals.org Official Site]
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