Magnus Macfarlane-Barrow’s first experience of delivering aid was to drive a Land Rover bursting with food, clothing and medication from the Highlands of Scotland down to Bosnia. At the time he used to be a salmon farmer : he had taken just a week’s holiday to do it. When he got back, his family shed was bulging with aid that had poured in from pals and friends of friends. He give up his job, sold his home, and learned to drive related vans. Now, about 20 years later, his charity Mary’s Meals feeds 500k kids every day.

But that’s not the beginning of the tale. At least, not how Magnus tells it. The real beginning was 10 years back when he was 14, and he went on a pilgrimage to a tiny town called Medjugorje.

I meet Magnus for tea near London Victoria. He’s tall and in a suit ; his hair is greying a bit at the sides. He is saying he finds it hard to describe the effect that first trip had on him. “It was something in my heart an experience of God’s grace,” he is saying. Later on he describes it as “something God appears to do for many folks there : [he] gives them a cognizance of his love for them”.

It had been a madcap adventure : 10 of his family and friends, all kids, turned up at Medjugorje without anywhere to stay. They had read an article about 6 children having visions of the Virgin Mary and thought if it was possibly true they should visit. They flew in to Dubrovnik and drove there in two hire autos (harder than it sounds, since their map failed to have Medjugorje on it).

After evening Mass a friar, Fr Slavko Barbarous, came over to them and introduced them to his sister, who they ended up staying with for the week and who had kids their age. It was, Magnus says, an “amazing mixture of the supernatural and the mundane” one minute they’d be chatting to Bosnian youngsters about Italian soccer and the next “we’d all be talking about the undeniable fact that one of them was going out with one of the visionaries”.

At the time the six purported visionaries were young kids, too. They invited Magnus’s group into the room where they were having apparitions of the Virgin Mary every evening. Magnus knows two of them still.

What struck him, though, was not the visionaries themselves they were “very nice, very standard people” but the religion of the villagers and the way that they answered to what the six children were pronouncing.

“By the time I came home,” he is saying, “I had the assumption that Our Woman really was appearing in Medjugorje and she was appearing with a message for the entire world.”

He says that he would have liked to try, “in whatever way I could, to retort to her invitation to put God back at the centre”.

About ten years later Magnus was in a bar with his bro Fergus. They were talking about a news item they had seen about refugees near Medjugorje during the Bosnian war. And that’s when they thought about driving help there themselves.

Magnus has a tendency to play down his role in all this. Once the donations came pouring in, he asserts, “it was tougher to stop than it had been to start”. Giving up his place and job was no enormous sacrifice, he insists . He’d been a salmon farmer for 6 years and was “looking to do something else anyway”.

After 20 minutes or so of chatting Magnus, though really mild-mannered, talks at a phenomenal pace we don’t forget to pour the tea. Over the next 10 years, he explains, his charity Scottish International Relief brought aid to Bosnia, built care houses in Romania and worked in Liberia and elsewhere.

His stories pour out and are examples of the most moving I’ve ever heard. He talks about 11-year-old Romanian orphans so neglected they could not walk correctly. The kids, all HIV positive, had been deserted in surgeries and no one had lifted them out of their cots long enough for them to learn. The doctors, he is saying, “couldn’t see any worth in those youngsters at all and they were dying, numbers of them, every week”.

Magnus recalls an exchange with one doctor who said : “I do not know why you’re building these [care] homes for these kids.” Pointing to one girl, Juliana, he revealed : “She’ll be dead before you even finish building them.” Now, Magnus claims, “Juliana’s a young woman, and a few summers ago I returned for the weddings of 3 of those girls. It’s been a miracle to me because we thought we were building an infirmary where they could have a serious death so truly it has been a superb thing that every one of them are still alive.”

Magnus has masses of these stories, and is used to informing them, I believe. He gives talks in colleges and to fundraising groups. He asserts at 1 time : “I’m sure there’s only a little of all this stuff you want, because there’s plenty of it.” as reported tagza.com.

No related posts.

Tagged with: • •

Filed under: December Travel Deals

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!