A Twitch of A Thought 10 Years On

Mazuba Mwiinga

Two years ago, around this time, Medjugorje, Bosnia, Eastern Europe, was my temporal home. Over a whooping 9,000Km on a vector, from my residential town of Chipata, Eastern Zambia.

Borrowed from a Slavic name meaning an area between two hills, also known as Apparition Hill, Medjugorje is made up almost entirely of more than 2,000 Croatian Catholics, though records now show that the town has a population of around 5000 people.

In earlier days, Medjugorje’s people once lived mainly on agriculture and cattle-breeding, with wine brewing emerging top. No wonder, I probably wandered incessantly in the nights that followed, sampling the? ?finely fermented vinos, mostly at the famous Colombo Restaurant.

The positive energy that smoothened my face once I stepped foot on this small town, was too irresistible to take a bath of unavoidable spirit of love, peace and companionship flowing around.

Pious history has it that, since the appearance of Our Lady, Mary the Mother of Jesus in 1981, Medjugorje has changed to a place of prayer, peace and conversion attracting over one million pilgrims every year.

At the corner of the town is St James Church built in 1969, dedicated to St James the Apostle, protector of the pilgrims. It is the central place of prayer for Medjugorje, celebrating many Masses in different languages every day.

Medjugorje’s shops are stocked with ornaments, bracelets, carvings, neck laces, finger rings, post cards, dolls, bags, T-shirts, paintings, drawings and many other souvenirs you can mention, symbolising Catholicism.

From this mystic town, the seed of Mary’s Meals was instinctively planted. In his memoir, ‘The Shed That Fed A Million Children,’ Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, who later founded Mary’s Meals, recounts how he and his siblings had travelled to Medjugorje in 1983, after hearing of a group of visionaries who were seeing The Virgin Mary since 24 June 1981. After his parents’ return from a similar pilgrimage, they felt compelled to turn the family guest house into Craig Lodge Family House of Prayer, a Catholic retreat centre.

Years later, Magnus’ pickings from his Medjugorje pilgrim would be unexpectedly tested. The year was 1992. Location: probably on a warm day in Scotland, kilometres away from Bosnia. That day, Magnus and his brother Fergus, were enjoying a pint to cool themselves, when pictures of a raging war in Bosnia took centre stage in TV news bulletins.

On that day, he got an idea that would radically change both his life and that of others. Like a twitch of a thought, Magnus and Fergus decided to take a break from work, loaded a jeep with aid and joined a convoy travelling to Medjugorje to distribute it. It was to be a one-off trip, so they thought. In the thick of things however, their beaten-up jeep rapidly grew to become Magnus’ life-work. As fate would be, he never returned to his old job. He instead set up a registered charity called Scottish International Relief and directed all his efforts to feeding thousands of the world’s poorest children.

With the signing of the Dayton Agreement on December 14, 1995, the war in Bosnia ended. But that would not be Magnus’ end of his momentous charity work, as they say, the end of war is actually the beginning of a major one. Restoration of human dignity to the victims.

As if fate, led his footsteps, in 2002, across the sea, famine was wreaking havoc the nation of Malawi in south-east Africa. ?The food crisis that year resulted in several hundred hunger-related deaths. Scholars, rated it, the worst famine in living memory, more worse than the Nyasaland famine of 1949. Relief Web reported that, between January and April of that year, at least 500 to 1,000 people died of hunger and hunger related diseases in the southern and central regions of the country.

When Magnus visited Malawi that year, he met a 14-year-old boy, Edward - the eldest of six children. Huddling around their ill mother, Magnus asked Edward what he hoped for in life. Edward knew exactly what he needed in life: "I would like to have enough food to eat and to be able to go to school one day," Edward replied.

From that simple conversation, Mary’s Meals was born, providing school meals to around 200 children in Malawi the following year. To date, the Malawi School Feeding Programme, feeds over 2 million learners, country wide.

Fourteen years later; 2014, Mary’s Meals set base in Zambia. Twenty-five schools were on-boarded, feeding just over 18, 000 learners. Over the years, the School Feeding Programme has become the second biggest country programme in the Mary’s Meals’ 18 country global operations, currently providing over 300 million meals to learners since 2014, with over 400,000 learners in 742 schools in 11 districts of Eastern Province on the programme.

Though no definitive numbers exist currently on the correlation between food insecurity and rise of teen pregnancies in the province, one would still be worried with the effects of poverty, made worse by droughts that has rendered many school going girls vulnerable to pregnancies and early marriages. Girls find themselves in serious dilemmas, that force them into acts that endanger their health, and better futures, just in the hope of stepping over the pangs of poverty.

The Mary's Meals Zambia School Feeding Programme has however influenced some of these teen mothers back to school where they are able to have a meal that gives them hope of a better future.

In the past 10 years, the meals have consistently continued contributing to the learners’ healthy lives that have kept them in schools, and reduced the household burden of making sure the learners are fed before going to school, thereby using the resources the families would have spent on them, to cover gaps in their income generating activities that keep sustaining their household needs.

What began as a twitch of a thought, over a pint, observing stressing human conflicts years ago, has continued being an inspiring Medjugorje spirit, that creates educational opportunities to the neediest school learners, thereby moulding them for a better future.

A pure simple solution to world hunger.