Getting to the top of the mountain, with love

Roy Peachey • January 18, 2025

Over recent months, I have been visiting many wonderful schools to share the remarkable story of Mary’s Meals. I tell the children about Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, a fish farmer who took a week off work to drive aid from Scotland to Bosnia-Herzegovina when war engulfed that country during the 1990s.

I show them the tin shed in his garden where he stored the aid – the shed that is still our global headquarters – and explain that Magnus never went back to his former work because donations of food and blankets kept flooding into the shed. He ended up driving to Bosnia 23 times.

I tell the students how Magnus eventually ended up in Malawi and about his conversation with Edward, a 14-year-old boy, who told him that his ambitions in life were to have enough to eat and to go to school one day.

I tell them how Mary’s Meals started feeding 200 children in Malawi in 2002 and that today we are feeding 2,429,182 children in 17 countries around the world. We feed them in their schools, meeting their immediate need for food while also enabling them to receive the education that will lift them out of poverty.

The children are amazed to hear that, on average, a meal costs around 10 pence. They love the idea that children like them can make a difference to children their own age in some of the poorest parts of the world.

I am full of awe for the children I meet. Students of St Oscar Romero School in Goring-by-Sea walked Hadrian’s Wall and part of the South Downs Way, raising £14,000 in the process – enough to feed 731 children for a whole school year. Year 6 students at St Francis Catholic Primary School in Caterham visited all the other classes in their school, told them about Mary’s Meals and recruited them for their summer fair. One child scurried off at the end of our assembly to fetch 70 pence from his bag, so that he could do his bit.

It has been a real privilege to visit churches, universities, businesses, Catenians, cub scouts and many other groups during my first few months with Mary’s Meals, but it is the schools that have made the greatest impression on me. School + Food = Hope, as we say. I have seen that hope in abundance.

One school in particular lingers in my mind. It is a school I have never visited and am never likely to visit: a school on top of a mountain in Malawi.

I first got to know about Mary’s Meals through Magnus’s wonderful book, The Shed that Fed 2 Million Children, and through the excellent films on the Mary’s Meals website and YouTube channel. In his book and in one of those films, Magnus tells the story of how he was approached by some villagers who wanted him to bring Mary’s Meals to their primary school. The only problem was that the school was on top of a mountain, three miles from the nearest road.

“If you can get the food to the bottom of the mountain,” the villagers told him, “we will carry it up for our children.”

So that’s what happened. Mary’s Meals brought 20kg sacks of Likuni Phala, a corn and soya porridge, to the foot of the mountain, and the mums of that village carried them up to the school.

In the film, those heroic women walk barefoot up the steep slope for three hours, singing and dancing all the way. Some carry two sacks on their heads. One lady carries three sacks. Magnus often speaks about the little acts of love that help us reach the next hungry child. This is one great act of love.

We are not in the business of solving other people’s problems for them. What we see here in Malawi and other countries around the world, from Lebanon to Ecuador, are local communities changing children’s lives; local farmers growing the food; volunteers from villages building the kitchens and cooking the meals; mums climbing a mountain with sacks of Likuni Phala on their heads.

As I visit schools in the UK and meet wonderful, hope-filled students, I think about Chaone Primary School in Malawi. I recall that marvellous moment when the mums reach the top of the mountain and the whole school meets them. They are singing and dancing, full of joy because a simple meal has reached them. I give thanks we can be involved in a small way in this great work of love.

“What gets Mary’s Meals to the top of the mountain?” I ask the children gathered in front of me in school hall after school hall. The answer is there before them: “A community’s love for its children.”

Photo: Image from Mary’s Meals

Roy Peachey is supporter engagement officer at Mary’s Meals UK, marysmeals.org.uk