“In the last few years, after decades of progress, child hunger is on the rise in too many places across the world—driven by conflict, extreme weather, economic shocks and the fact that many of the wealthiest nations in the world are reducing their aid budgets.”
That is what Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, the Scottish-born founder of Mary’s Meals, a global movement he set up 24 years ago to provide free school meals for children in some of the world’s poorest countries, told Pope Francis at the Vatican summit on the rights of the child on Feb. 3.
He said he believes “every child has a right to a daily meal in their place of education,” and saw “no good reason” why we cannot make this happen for the world’s poorest children because “we have more than enough resources to do this.”
He underlined the fact that it is possible to combat child hunger because “today it costs, on average, $25 to serve one child with meals for a whole school year in the world’s lowest-income countries.” In other words, roughly the price of a hamburger with French fries in Manhattan or Rome.
After the Vatican summit, I sat down with Magnus to talk about Mary’s Meals and what led to its creation. His story is both fascinating and inspiring. CNN named him one of its Heroes of the Year in 2010, and Time listed him among the 100 most influential people in the world in 2015.
Magnus was born into a Catholic family in the city of Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1968. The family later moved to Dalmally, a village in Argyll and Bute, where he still lives and where, from a shed, he directs the global movement.
Over Christmas in 1983, Magnus, then 16, went with his older sister, younger brother and other teenage friends to the village of Medjugorje, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, after reading about Our Lady’s apparitions there to local teenagers.
It was a religious experience that would impact his life, as he recalled in The Shed that Fed a Million Children, his best-selling book about Mary’s Meals:
During those few days in Medjugorje, I experienced a feeling of deep joy unlike anything I had felt before. I felt exhilarated. Our Lady had come to tell us God existed. I believed her with every fibre of my being. I decided to respond to Our Lady’s invitation in my life as best I could.
In November 1992, after reading a press report about the disastrous effects near Medjugorje of the Bosnian War, Magnus and his brother felt called to help. He made appeals to friends for clothes, blankets and other essential items, and then they set out in a Jeep loaded with aid for Bosnia. It was his first drive in what would later become a life’s mission. To continue this work, he set up a charity called “Scottish International Relief.” In the process, he met Julie, a nurse, whom he would later marry and with whom he had seven children.
In 1997, thanks to Father Pat McGuire, a former missionary in Africa who helped collect humanitarian aid for his Bosnia project, he also began sending aid to a priest helping poverty-stricken people in war-torn Liberia. In 2002, the Scottish media began reporting on famine spreading across nations in Southern Africa, including Malawi. He had just one contact in Malawi, a woman who had written to them after reading his sister’s story about their Medjugorje visit. He managed to contact her and, with his sister, decided to visit her to get to know the situation in Malawi.
At the Vatican summit, he told Pope Francis how that visit was a turning point in his life.
I had a conversation with a very hungry child. It was a conversation that changed my life—and eventually the lives of millions of others, too. The child was called Edward, and I met him in a village in Malawi during a time of great hunger. He was 14 years old, and along with his five younger siblings, he was sitting beside his mother Emma, who was dying. All of them were very obviously malnourished. I asked Edward what his hopes and ambitions were for his life. He looked at me and said: “I would like to have enough food to eat. And I would like to go to school one day.”
Magnus said: “His words ignited Mary’s Meals—a global movement which sets up free school meal programs—through which locally produced food is cooked and served by local volunteers to the children of their own communities.” Today, nearly 2.5 million children are fed by Mary’s Meals in Malawi, Liberia, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Kenya, Uganda, South Sudan, Mozambique, Madagascar, Ethiopia, Benin, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, Ecuador, India and Haiti.
When I asked why child hunger is on the rise today, Magnus answered by first dismissing “some commonly held myths,” such as “there is just not enough food in the world, or there are too many people, too many children.” He said: “It is clear that we live in a world that, despite real challenges, is an abundant world. We produce more than enough food for all of us to eat.”
Magnus identified “several drivers” of the increase in hunger today. “First, climate change. I’ve just come back from Malawi, where their whole system of agriculture is broken. Nearly everyone grows food there, and now they are planting for the fourth time this year because every time they’ve planted, the rains haven’t come, the crops have died, and those lucky enough still to have seeds are trying again.”
The second and largest driver, he said, is conflict. “The war in Ukraine is affecting the whole global economy,” he said. “It’s affecting the price of fertilizer and so many other things.”
A third cause is “the general economic situation in the world that sees food prices rising faster than people’s income. So many millions of people who were on the edge have fallen over the edge in the last years and months.”
In addition to all this, he said, “we have governments cutting their aid budgets.” He lamented that “after decades of progress in the global battle with hunger, we’re going backward all of a sudden.”
He witnessed this when he went to Tigray, Ethiopia, last year, where over half the children had dropped out of school because of hunger. He met a teacher in an empty school who told him, “When there are no children left in the playground, there’s no hope left either.” A lot of the poorest communities find themselves in this situation today, he said, and “there’s a real temptation toward despair, especially when parents can’t feed their own children.”
“Of course it’s depressing, but it’s certainly not hopeless,” Magnus said, “because within that global picture we also see lots of examples of things that are working.” Mary’s Meals is one of them. He mentioned meeting young people in Liberia and Malawi who told him: “Without the meals, I never would have gone to school. I might not even be alive today.”
He said many of them now have jobs or have started their own businesses or improved their family farms simply because they can read and write and are healthy. Some are working for Mary’s Meals, like Letty, whom he first met when she was a 12-year-old orphan looking after her two younger brothers, all of them hungry and malnourished, who had never been to school. “So we took her to a school the next day where we served Mary’s Meals,” he said. She became a very good student, is about to finish college, wants to be a journalist and is working for the movement’s communications team in Malawi. “There are thousands of Lettys in the Mary’s Meals story,” he said.
As he reflected back on his life’s work, Magnus remarked, “The first thing I’ve learned over the past 30 years is how good most people are. I really believe in the innate goodness of people. I didn’t plan for any of this. It happened because when I made a small appeal for people to give us things to take to the people suffering in Bosnia, we were overwhelmed by people’s goodness, and it never stopped. And that’s really our story over and over these years, being overwhelmed by people’s kindness and willingness to share.”
Asked what he feels when he sees President Donald Trump shutting down the U.S. Agency for International Development, one of the biggest governmental aid agencies in the world, Magnus said: “It’s not just the U.S. government, is it? Many governments in wealthy countries are cutting aid right now, and, of course, that has an impact, and it’s having an impact at a time when child hunger is on the rise dramatically…. While these cuts don’t have a direct impact on us as an organization, they clearly do have an impact on the communities that we serve, and I’m painfully aware of that.”
While Mary’s Meals had received some funding from the U.K. government and U.S.A.I.D. in the past, Magnus said: “We think there are huge advantages to being reliant on a grassroots movement of thousands and thousands of people giving small donations. That allows us to make long-term commitments to the communities that we walk alongside for years and years, and not rely on a government grant that falls off after three or five years.”
Listening to him and reading his book, I was struck by the fact that he didn’t have a strategic plan but just went to places that cried out for help. I remarked, “The Bible says God is the Lord of human history, and it seems he’s very much the Lord of your life, too.” He responded, “Yes, he is!” He added that Mary’s Meals “is not like some idea of mine; it’s not the result of some clever strategic plan. For me, at least, it’s like a gift, an unexpected gift, like one of those gifts you might get at Christmas. It’s got lots and lots of wrappings around it, and you keep on unwrapping and then, wow, this is even more beautiful than I first realized. But that’s what it feels like.”
“The most amazing things that have happened in the story of Mary’s Meals aren’t things I ever planned or saw coming,” he said. “So it’s quite important for me, in terms of being a person of faith, to allow that space for God to work, for God to surprise us, for the Holy Spirit to do things that we might not have planned. Because we can squeeze the life out of that if we’re not careful, with all our human planning.”
When I remarked that I was struck by the support that he has received for his charitable work from people of all ages over these years, he said: “That’s one of the miracles of the story. Over and over again, people do these things. They just make me feel so small. It’s beyond me to even explain what moves them to do so much for Mary’s Meals, to do incredible things in terms of sharing what they have.”
He cited the example of a couple in the Czech Republic who were business owners and for many years, had been saving up to build their dream house. They had bought the land and had the plans drawn up by an architect and were ready to start when someone gave them his book. “As they were reading the book,” he said, “this couple started asking themselves: ‘Are we really meant to build this house? Is that really what God wants us to do?’ And they decided they weren’t going to build their dream house; instead, they were going to use all that money to start a branch of Mary’s Meals in the Czech Republic, and today it’s growing fast.”
Overall, he said, Mary’s Meals has fundraising operations in 22 countries worldwide, including in New York and the Midwestern United States.
“In my experiences,” he said, “I see more and more how people learn to share and are doing it in a very profound way. They’re the happiest people. They’re the happiest people I know, and I am humbled by them.”
