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The Shed That Fed a Million Children: The Mary’s Meals Story
Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow


Speaking Volumes Christian Book of the Year 2016In 1992, Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow was enjoying a pint with his brother when he got an idea that would change his life – and radically change the lives of others.After watching a news bulletin about war-torn Bosnia, the two brothers agreed to take a week’s hiatus from work to help.What neither of them expected is that what began as a one-time road trip in a beaten-up Landrover rapidly grew to become Magnus’s life’s work – leading him to leave his job, sell his house and direct all his efforts to feeding thousands of the world’s poorest children.Magnus retells how a series of miraculous circumstances and an overwhelming display of love from those around him led to the creation of Mary’s Meals; an organisation that could hold the key to eradicating child hunger altogether. This humble, heart-warming yet powerful story has never been more relevant in our society of plenty and privilege. It will open your eyes to the extraordinary impact that one person can make.










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Copyright (#u47ad9d26-c1c2-5610-ba61-bb4c938d2ac0)


William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers

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www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com (http://www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com)

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2015

Copyright © Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow 2015

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow asserts the moral right

to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record of this book is

available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

Source ISBN: 9780008127640

Ebook Edition © May 2015 UK ISBN: 9780007578337/ US ISBN: 9780008132712

Version: 2016-02-10




Dedication (#u47ad9d26-c1c2-5610-ba61-bb4c938d2ac0)


This book is for Julie, without whom there would

have been nothing at all to write about.

Thank you for loving me.




Contents


Cover (#ud213aca4-a9b5-5d1c-81d0-9f02a0098f65)

Title Page (#ulink_d06e7c80-b690-5100-a4d3-32fce6a0520c)

Copyright (#ulink_6ca46a94-9408-5c71-a042-f7f8f4eb725c)

Dedication (#ulink_2a86d143-cd2e-53f5-b653-353e05212b1f)

Prologue (#ulink_abcd7240-303d-550a-9013-1f91a28667d8)

1 Driving Lessons in a War Zone (#ulink_2d955dc4-ea5c-5e59-950f-f41c0c9d6d58)

2 A Woman Clothed with the Sun (#ulink_f28c5f38-59d5-525d-abac-65d20869387e)

3 Little Acts of Love (#ulink_375f10f8-6f92-542e-940f-91e5ca3582cd)

4 Suffer Little Children (#ulink_0cb4878b-eeed-53b5-b2f7-2438a48d1022)

5 Into Africa (#litres_trial_promo)

6 A Famine Land (#litres_trial_promo)

7 One Cup of Porridge (#litres_trial_promo)

8 A Bumpy Road to Peace (#litres_trial_promo)

9 In Tinsel Town (#litres_trial_promo)

10 Reaching the Outcastes (#litres_trial_promo)

11 Friends in High Places (#litres_trial_promo)

12 Friends in Low Places (#litres_trial_promo)

13 Generation Hope (#litres_trial_promo)

Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo)

Picture Section (#litres_trial_promo)

Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)

Thank you … (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




Prologue (#u47ad9d26-c1c2-5610-ba61-bb4c938d2ac0)


I am writing this in my father’s shed. An east wind is blowing from behind Ben Lui, whose snow-powdered flanks I can see through the window above my desk. Some of the cold air buffeting and moaning around my corrugated-iron shelter has found a way in. There is a draught gnawing my feet. I can hear someone using a power saw in the distance, perhaps my brother-in-law at the firewood, and every so often a tractor chugs down the track towards the farm.

We don’t know exactly when the shed was built. It was certainly here a long time before we arrived in 1977. It is clearly marked on a map, dated 1913, hanging in an old wood-panelled corridor of Craig Lodge (my favourite part of the house when it was our family home), meaning it has been standing here for over a hundred years. That the shed is quite clearly leaning to one side today is therefore easily forgiven and it is understandable, perhaps, that I can now hear something clanking in the wind on the roof above me.

Initially, after we arrived, it served as Dad’s garage and workshop. It was the perfect size for parking the old Land Rover, in which I would one day learn to drive. Later, he converted it into a playroom, surprising us one Christmas by opening its door to reveal a magnificent pool table. My brothers and I spent many hours enjoying that gift, while at the back of the shed, right outside my window, was our football pitch. Seumas, Fergus and I played for hours there every day, shooting at home-made wooden goals, our pounding feet creating a muddy, grassless strip. In the winter months, when the darkness arrived frustratingly early, we would sometimes turn on the lights of the shed and all the neighbouring outbuildings, in a desperate attempt to create enough illumination for at least a few extra minutes of play. Later, in our rather wild teenage years, friends would join us in the pool shed. Sometimes beer would be smuggled in. Once, when my parents were away, it was the catastrophic scene of the experimental sampling of my home-made cider. I had brewed this secretly, using apples from trees in the little orchard above where my own house stands today. I have never been able to drink cider since.

Later, after we had left home and Craig Lodge had become a Catholic retreat centre, the shed, for a few years, became a little ‘rosary factory’, where members of a resident youth community made prayer beads of various styles and colours. Then, in 1992, I asked Dad if I could borrow this shed, as well as the one next door, to store donations of aid that were arriving in response to a little appeal we were making for the refugees in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Of course he didn’t hesitate in saying yes. Indeed, he and Mum were doing most of the work involved in collecting and preparing the aid. Even if he had known then that he would never get either of his sheds back I believe he still would have agreed, mainly because he is a man more generous than any other I have met, but also because it would have given him an excuse to build some new sheds. Fortunately, this is something Dad loves to do. He is, in fact, a serial shed-builder.

Eventually, after serving for some years as a storage space for parcels of clothes, food, toiletries and medical equipment, the shed became our office, first for me as the sole employee of the charity, before I was joined by my sister Ruth and eventually a team of five. At this stage it was so cramped that some, without desks, worked with laptops on their knees. And so at this point Dad’s adjoining shed was demolished and he along with George, a very gifted friend of ours, constructed an amazing purpose-built timber office with their own hands. It is a thing of beauty and extremely practical too. But when the time came to move into the bright new office, I chose to stay here, in the old shed. This was a good decision. To some it may seem odd, perhaps even stupid, to retain the HQ of a global organization in this lopsided and tired-looking shed, in a very remote part of Scotland. But being here helps remind me how and why we began this work. Besides, I know some people, living in poverty, who would be deeply grateful to have a house as large and secure as this for their family to live in.

Indeed, among the collection of photographs and notes stuck to the wall above my desk is one of a family who lived in a house as small and more sparsely furnished than this. My meeting with them in 2002 during a terrible famine in Malawi, ten years after we had driven that first little collection of aid to Bosnia-Herzegovina, changed my life – and thousands of others – forever.

In the picture six young children are sitting beside their dying mother. She is lying on a straw mat. I remember it being unpleasantly hot inside their mud-brick house. My shirt was drenched and even though I stooped, my head rubbed their low ceiling. I felt awkward; like an oversized intruder in their tiny home at the most intimate of family moments. But they had welcomed me in warmly and so I squatted down beside them to talk. My eyes, with the help of some light that was seeping in through a small glassless window, had adjusted to the deep gloom inside the tiny space and I could see that Emma, wrapped in an old grey blanket, was wringing her hands continuously as she spoke to us.

‘There is nothing left now except to pray that someone looks after my children when I am gone,’ she had whispered, and, softly, she began to tell me about the reason for her torment.

Her husband had died a year previously, killed by AIDS, the same disease that was now about to steal her from her children. All of the adults she knew in the village were already caring for orphaned children in addition to their own. She did not know who would be willing to look after hers, she explained. Her physical pain was excruciating too. The neighbour who was looking after Emma, and who translated our conversation, was a trained ‘home-based carer’ and was doing her heroic best to ease Emma’s suffering, but she was unable to offer even a simple painkiller, never mind drugs to treat HIV/AIDS. Not that those drugs would have helped much anyway, because for them to be effective a patient needs to be eating a healthy, nutritious diet. Emma and her children had not had enough food to eat for a long time. Their hut was surrounded by parched fields in which their maize had not grown properly that year. The tummy of Chinsinsi, the youngest child on the mat, was noticeably distended from his malnutrition.

I had begun to speak to Edward, the oldest of the children. He sat straight-backed, as if wanting to appear taller than he actually was. His black T-shirt was several sizes too big for him, but unlike the filthy torn rags adorning the waists of his siblings it looked clean. He told me he was fourteen years old and explained that he spent most of his time helping his mother in their fields or in the house. Maybe I was just desperately grasping for a chink through which something brighter might steal into our depressing conversation, when I asked him what his hopes and ambitions were. I was certainly not looking for an answer that would change my life and the lives of hundreds of thousands of others.

‘I would like to have enough food to eat and I would like to be able to go to school one day,’ he replied solemnly, after a moment’s thought.

When our conversation had finished, and the children followed us out into the scorching Malawian sunlight, those simple words, spoken like a teenager’s daring dream, had already become inscribed in my heart. A cry, a scandal, a confirmation of an idea that had already begun to form, a call to action that could not be ignored; his words would become many things for me. The horrible family tragedy unfolding in that dark hut had synthesized a multitude of sufferings and intractable problems with which I had become closely acquainted during the previous ten years. And his words authenticated an inspiration recently shared with me; they were the spark that ignited the already smouldering notion that became Mary’s Meals.

On the shed wall behind me, a poster, headed boldly, proclaims our vision statement:

That every child receives one daily meal in their place of education, and that all those who have more than they need share with those who lack even the most basic things.

With every passing week, in the years since my encounter with Edward, that vision has grown ever brighter and the belief it can be realized proclaimed more confidently. We have seen repeatedly that the provision of a daily school meal really can transform the lives of the poorest children by meeting their immediate need for food, while also enabling them to enter the classroom and gain the education that can be their escape from poverty. And the number of those daily meals served by local volunteers to hungry impoverished children in schools around the world has grown in an extraordinary manner. Today, over a million children eat Mary’s Meals each school day.

I am very fond of my shed. It provides me the quiet space I often crave, while having just enough room for four or five visitors to sit with me round a table, have a cup of tea and talk. And my confinement to this office also gives my co-workers the space they most certainly need from me, an incurably untidy man. It is also the obvious place in which to write this book. The picture of Edward and his family is just one of many things stuck to my wall that illustrate landmarks on our journey: a Bosnian man playing with a dog outside his destroyed house; children laughing in a dusty African playground; a blind Liberian man with a home-made white stick and the most beautiful smile; another group of children from Dalmally – my own among them – painting the outside of the shed; a young Julie driving our truck just after I first met her; a middle-aged Julie and I meeting Pope Francis; a recent picture of me and Hollywood star Gerard Butler laughing as we carry buckets of water on our heads; a passport-sized picture of Attila, one of the first of our children in Romania to die; a card on which is written Thank You from Texas, surrounded by lots of sweet, handwritten notes from school pupils there; a postcard from Medjugorje; a simple, wooden cross made in Liberia; and a photograph of Father Tom pretending to punch someone in Haiti. Above the window, under the rusty casing of a strip light, hangs a little crucifix. Some large maps adorn the other walls – the world, India, Malawi, the New York subway and several others.

A scatter of letters and notebooks lie around my laptop. There is a polite note from the president of Malawi (where we now feed over 25 per cent of the primary-school population), thanking me for our recent meeting and for our work. Another is from someone in Haiti, pleading with us to start Mary’s Meals in some schools there with desperate need. And another anonymous one, which made me cry when I first read it:

Dear Mary’s Meals

Enclosed is a $55 check to help feed another child. This comes from a man who is in a nursing home, is wheelchair bound, right-side paralysed and unable to speak. He is financially supported by Medicare and Medicaid. The $55 represents his entire savings account. He pulled it out from two different hiding places when he heard about Mary’s Meals. I am certain it will be put to good use.

God Bless you.

I never planned to get involved in this kind of work, and certainly never set out to found an organization. I am a rather unlikely and poorly qualified person to lead such a mission. Mainly, it has unfolded despite me, through a whole series of unexpected happenings and comings-together of people, and gentle invitations responded to by all sorts of people with extraordinary love and faithfulness. The meeting with Edward, while crucial in focusing us on the work we now do, was only one more in a chain of events that had already spanned twenty years by the time he spoke those words to me. And that chain had begun to form when I was only fifteen years old, in an obscure village amid the mountains of Yugoslavia, where I had encountered another loving mother concerned about her children.



1




Driving Lessons in a War Zone (#u47ad9d26-c1c2-5610-ba61-bb4c938d2ac0)


Be humble for you are made of dung. Be noble, for you are made of stars.

SERBIAN SAYING

We knew that the men who launched death from the top of the mountains overlooking the city normally slept off their hangovers in the mornings. For this reason we set off early, confident that we could get in and out of Mostar before the heavy weapons resumed their relentless task of tearing the homes, churches, mosques, vehicles and people of the city apart. Squeezed into the passenger seats beside me, for this last leg of our four-day drive from Scotland, were Father Eddie, a short, plump, middle-aged priest, and Julie, a tall, beautiful young nurse. Over the last few days the three of us had become good friends. Two nights ago, parked beside a filling station in Slovenia, we had talked long into the night. Father Eddie surprised and disturbed us a little by explaining that before leaving Scotland he’d had a feeling he might never return home and so had given away most of his worldly possessions to his parishioners. Later, Julie told us how, a few months earlier, she had awoken in the middle of the night feeling strongly that God was asking her to give up her job to help the people in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Her story moved me because of her deep faith and because it had some similarities to my own. I felt a little ashamed that when she had first phoned me to ask for a lift to Bosnia-Herzegovina I had not been at all enthusiastic about the idea. By now I was very glad she had managed to change my mind.

As we drove through a harsh Bosnian landscape of jagged rocks and thorn bushes, we prayed a rosary together and then chatted a bit nervously as I concentrated on the twisting narrow road. Soon we began to pass the remains of people’s homes. Some were reduced to piles of rubble, while those still standing had become burnt-out bullet-marked carcasses. We drove on in silence. The road began to snake downhill and Mostar appeared below us, sprawling along the Neretva, the famous river which has often been described as a dividing line between the cultures of East and West and which today was the frontline between Serbian forces and the Croat and Muslim territory through which we were driving. The minarets of mosques were visible down in the old Ottoman quarter, and for a moment I thought of my first visit to this town many years before when we had browsed little street stalls beside the river and watched young men prove their bravery by leaping from the famous Stari Most Bridge into the rushing green torrents below. On the descent into the city we were stopped at a checkpoint manned by HVO (Bosnian Croat Army) soldiers. A thin man with a machine gun on his shoulder and cigarette in his mouth walked to my open window and stared at us sullenly, his brandy breath drifting into our cab. Unsmiling, he held out his hand, and we gave him our passports and the customs papers for the medical equipment in the back of the truck. The delivery of this equipment was the reason for our journey and now, about a kilometre away, on the slopes of the city below us, we could see Mostar’s general hospital, our final destination. It was easily recognizable and we stared at the modern, shiny high-rise building, which towered above the surrounding houses. Even at that distance we could see that a shell had ripped a massive ragged hole in its side. The soldier waved us on and we drove carefully through streets of twisted metal, shards of glass, piles of rubble, burnt-out cars, chewed-up tarmac and hate-filled graffiti. We entered the hospital grounds. Outside the hospital several refrigerated trucks were parked with their engines running; makeshift morgues for a city that had long run out of space for its dead. Under the front-door canopy, three hospital staff in white overalls recognized our arrival and waved. My anxiety eased and a feeling of elation took hold of me. I was beginning to congratulate myself silently on a job well done, and found myself wondering if Julie was impressed, when I suddenly realized, a little too late, that the welcoming party’s waves were turning to urgent stop signals and their smiles to cringes. My heart hammered hard as I jammed on the brakes and heard a crunching noise above my head. In front of us, our welcome committee now doubled up in laughter and it was then I realized what had happened. Their hospital had just taken another direct hit; this time by a small, battered truck from Scotland, whose amateur driver had misjudged the height of the canopy overhanging the entrance and instead of parking under it had driven straight into it! A quick inspection revealed that I had torn a hole out of the top corner of the truck’s box, while the damage done to the hospital’s canopy was hardly significant compared to the punishment the rest of the building had been taking. The greatest, most lasting damage done was to my own ego.

We unloaded the equipment quickly and drank a hasty cup of coffee with two young male doctors. They suggested we get out of town before the shelling started and that we follow them to a safer venue for a chat. Near Medjugorje, where we were to stay the night, they stopped outside a roadside hotel that had been raked by gunfire and damaged by shells.

Over a coffee the doctors explained to us that, because of the extensive damage caused to their hospital by the shell strike, only the ground floor was now in operation. The building was becoming impossibly overcrowded and they were lacking even the most basic of medical supplies. They were particularly delighted with the external fixators we had brought them as they were treating so many patients with smashed limbs, and they urged us to deliver them more supplies. We explained to them that Julie had travelled with me because she was a nurse and was willing to give up her job in Scotland to work as a volunteer here. They replied that they had enough nurses but not enough medical equipment. They suggested that perhaps Julie join me in my efforts to collect surplus medical equipment in Scotland because by now they had realized that as well as not being able to drive a truck particularly well, I also didn’t know the first thing about medical supplies, so someone who did would have to get involved if I was to be of much further help to them. I was surprised by how delighted I felt at the prospect of Julie working with me, but just mumbled that we could mull it over. Julie said something similar and I decided I had better not get my hopes up. From medical matters the conversation drifted inevitably to the war situation. The doctors described how the ‘Chetniks’ on the mountains were now targeting not only the hospital, but ambulances too. Several had been destroyed while trying to carry patients to the hospital. By now they had swapped their Turkish coffees for Slivovitz (a local plum brandy) and they began to express how they felt about the war. They were filled with hatred towards their enemies the ‘Chetniks’ and it became a disturbing conversation. The two doctors, who had been talking to us for hours about what they needed to heal badly injured people, began to describe the terrible things they would do to any Chetnik soldier they could get their hands on. Clutching lists of urgently needed medical items, we took our leave, promising we would return with more supplies as soon as possible.

This was the fifth trip I had made to Bosnia-Herzegovina in quick succession, and on each previous one I had been accompanied by a different family member or friend. Each had been a precipitous learning curve for a twenty-five-year-old fish farmer who had not ever aspired to be a long-distance truck driver. I discovered a whole world with its own culture, inhabited by long-distance drivers, one which was not always welcoming or easy to understand. Language itself was a problem. There were new technical terms to learn such as the ‘tachograph’ (the device which records the driver’s hours and speed at the wheel) or ‘spedition’ (the agents who prepare necessary customs papers at border crossings). This was made all the harder by our lack of European languages and our Scottish accents. On one of my early trips my co-driver was Robert Cassidy, a good friend from Glasgow, whose accent therefore was stronger than my own one from Argyll. We were driving a 7.5 tonne truck full of donated Scottish potatoes to Zagreb. It was midwinter and bitterly cold. We slept in the back of the truck at night between the pallets of potatoes, and we woke one morning near the Austrian–Slovenian border to find that our large bottles of drinking water had frozen solid, while a sign at the petrol station told us it was six degrees below freezing. One of the new technical terms we were about to learn on this trip was ‘plomb’. This refers to the small seal made of lead, which the customs officials place on the back of a truck when you enter their country, so that when you exit you can prove you transited their territory without opening the trailer and depositing goods. But we didn’t know yet what this term meant and with growing irritation a customs inspector barked a one-word question through his glass window at us. ‘Plomb?’ He wanted to know if our truck was sealed. After answering this repeated question with a blank stare several times, Robert finally answered in his finest Glaswegian accent. ‘Nae plums, just tatties. Loads of tatties.’ This time it was the turn of the customs officer to answer with a bemused stare. He didn’t even know what language to reply to us in.

At this time some of the bridges on the main Adriatic coastal route that took us towards our routes into central Bosnia-Herzegovina had been destroyed by shells, and so to travel that way involved taking a small ferry to Pag (a long, narrow island running parallel to the coast), driving its length and getting a ferry back on to the mainland further south. On one occasion Ken, my brother-in-law and co-driver on this particular trip, and I joined a queue of hundreds of trucks waiting for a small makeshift ferry, on a road that certainly hadn’t been designed for large vehicles, just as an incredibly ferocious storm blew up. The ferries stopped sailing and, like all the other drivers, we found ourselves trapped in our cabs while a freezing wind blasted our truck, rocking it back and forth so violently it felt like we would be blown over. There was no way to turn a truck on that narrow road and so we all had no option but to wait for the storm to blow over. The only food we had in the cab was a large box of Twix chocolate bars, which we carefully eked out over the next forty-eight hours. A couple of times, to meet the call of nature, we fought with the door to climb outside and found ourselves slipping on a frozen stream of truck drivers’ urine that ran from the top of the hill to the little jetty at the bottom of the winding road. I made a mental note to carry a more varied, nutritious stock of emergency food supplies in future – or at the very least a greater variety of chocolate bars.

I also began to learn, on these early trips, that the donations of aid in the back of our truck were not always the most important things we brought to those in desperate need. My father and I once delivered aid to a little institution for children with special needs near the port of Zadar. At this time the Serb forces were attacking that part of the Croatian coast and we could hear the rumble of shells in the distance as we arrived outside the shabby little building. We found rows of children confined to cots, dressed in ragged pyjamas, and some terrified staff trying to care for them. Not only were they stressed about no longer having even the most basic supplies for the children, but the war was getting closer and they knew that to flee quickly and suddenly with these children would not be possible. As we unloaded our boxes of aid from the back of our truck, the staff’s delight soon evaporated as a shell exploded much closer to the village. And then another. They urged us to unload as quickly as possible and to get back on the road north immediately. As soon as I passed the last box from the back of the truck I said my goodbyes, jumped into the driver’s seat and revved the engine ready to go. A few seconds went by and I became annoyed that Dad hadn’t climbed into the seat beside me. When I looked in my rear-view mirror, I saw him hugging the most distraught nurse and giving her words of comfort and a promise of prayers. Only then did he climb in and we sped off. Thirty years later, when I heard Pope Francis use the term ‘sin of efficiency’ for the first time, I thought immediately of this incident. The Pope was reminding those of us who work with people in poverty, that real charity is not just about material goods or ‘projects’ and their ‘effectiveness’. It should also be about looking people in the eye, spending time with them and recognizing them as brothers or sisters. But even today I am not sure whether Dad’s hug had to take quite that long!

On each of those drives across Europe, as we came closer to our usual destination, Medjugorje, we would invariably see all sorts of other vehicles heading for that same world-renowned place of pilgrimage. Little convoys of small trucks like ours, solitary vans or family cars pulling trailers piled high with clothes, food and medicine, all converged on that little village in the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Flags, car stickers or home-made signs proclaimed their mission and their homeland, and gave clues to their destination. While we loved the opportunity to return to Medjugorje, given that our lives had been changed there many years earlier, we started to consider whether we should also begin taking our aid to other overlooked places, where less help was arriving but where even greater numbers of refugees were suffering.

One such place was Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, where thousands of desperate people were arriving from areas that were being ‘ethnically cleansed’ by the Serbs. At this stage nearly a third of a newly independent Croatia was under Serbian control, and war raged along all of the front lines of a country fighting desperately for its existence. Refugees and displaced people, Croats and Muslims from both Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina, were pouring into the city having lost their homes, their possessions, and often their families. Living in Zagreb was a remarkable man called Dr Marijo Živković. A mutual friend from Glasgow had suggested we meet. He had explained to us that Marijo was doing wonderful work for refugees and poor people, and also mentioned that he was a well-known and outspoken Catholic who had been persecuted by the communist regime for that reason. We arranged to meet him at the office of a Muslim organization called Merhamet with whom we were working to distribute medical aid. We had earlier that day arrived with an anaesthetic machine they had urgently requested and had spent the morning with a passionate young doctor and his Merhamet colleagues, learning more about their work and how we might help further. We were a little nervous about the meeting with Dr Marijo because, tragically, the Croats (mainly Catholic) and Muslims, who had until recently been allies in Bosnia-Herzegovina while fighting their common enemy, the Serbs, were now at war with each other, and a burning hatred was now raging between these two peoples. How stupid and thoughtless had we been to have invited a well-known Catholic Croat to come and meet with us while we were with our Muslim friends? We sensed that our hosts were also a little apprehensive and an awkward silence had taken hold of the hot stuffy room by the time Marijo finally arrived. Tall and broad-shouldered, he burst in cradling a huge pile of frozen chocolate bars.

‘Please take some!’ he laughed, approaching each of us in turn, inviting us to help ourselves to the treats on offer, as if he were an old friend of everyone in the room. Eventually, we were able to shake hands and introduce ourselves, and amid much laughter Marijo explained to us, in very good English, the story of the ice cream.

‘You see, a large Italian company wanted to donate all this ice cream – half a million ice creams! They contacted lots of the large aid organizations. Each said it was impossible for them to accept – a crazy, ridiculous idea, to send ice cream in mid-summer to people who had no way of storing it in freezers. Eventually someone told the Italians they should phone me and when they did, of course I said yes! How could you say no to all that ice cream when it could make so many people happy? So before it arrived I phoned lots of people to ask them to be ready to take quantities and give out to all their friends and everyone they meet – to take them to children – to schools. And I am sure they are nutritious too …’ He guffawed as he began to eat another one.

‘So today all over Zagreb people are eating free ice cream!’ He roared with laughter again and slapped the backs of his new Muslim friends, who were by now also in peals of laughter.

This was the first of many lessons I learnt from Dr Marijo over the coming years. He had a wonderful appreciation of the art of giving and receiving gifts. He didn’t like to use the word ‘aid’. He liked to talk about ‘gifts’. And rather than saying no to gifts that were offered, he found ingenious ways to accept. Before the war was over, he had even managed to better the famous ice-cream distribution incident when we asked him if he could accept hundreds of tonnes of potatoes from Scottish farmers. This time he solved the logistics, which seemed impossible to others, simply by unloading them all into a huge pile in a public square in the city centre. He then got on the public radio and invited the people of Zagreb to come and help themselves! The hungry inhabitants of the capital responded quickly and every last potato found a good home within hours.

Dr Marijo, an economist by training, had for many years been involved in promoting Catholic teaching on family issues in the former communist state of Yugoslavia. He began to be invited to give talks in various parts of the world and eventually he and his wife, Darka, were invited by the Pope to become members of the Pontifical Council for the Family. The communist authorities finally lost patience and took away his passport to prevent him from travelling. Undeterred, he instead began to organize international conferences in Zagreb, inviting people from many countries there, until eventually he was given his passport back. Meanwhile he and his family founded an organization called the Family Centre, to provide pregnant women living in poverty with practical help – baby clothing, food, prams, nappies, and so on. The desperate need for basic essential items – and not just those needed by babies – had become huge among the arriving refugees and the general population, and thus the Family Centre now devoted its attention to receiving and distributing goods to all in desperate need. After we had established that the Family Centre was giving aid to all, regardless of their ethnicity or religion (in fact the majority of the aid was being given to Muslims), we began delivering truckloads of Scottish gifts to Marijo’s old railway warehouse. On each visit we got to know Marijo, his wife Darka and their children better, often sleeping one night in their house before beginning our homeward journey. A man with a formidable intellect and a love of speaking publicly, he regaled us constantly with his words of wisdom and philosophy. He was not shy to speak of his various impressive achievements, but often these would be followed by him saying: ‘My greatest achievement in life is to have met and married Darka … my second greatest achievement in life are my five children … my only regret is we did not have more …’ He spoke about family – its beauty and importance – in a profound and sincere way.

Much of the aid we distributed with Marijo was delivered to various makeshift refugee camps, full mainly of women and children. In rows of overcrowded wooden cabins, built originally as accommodation for migrant workers, lived a group of women and children from the town of Kozarac in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina. Despite their trauma, or perhaps because of it, some of them wanted to speak about the horrors they had endured. Before the war, the overwhelming majority of their town was Muslim. For some time that area had been controlled by Serbs and the inhabitants in Kozarac were among the first to experience the evil of ‘ethnic cleansing’. The women told us how they had fled to the forest as the Serbs shelled their town, and when the last few Muslim fighters eventually surrendered, they heard the Serbs announce, through loudspeakers, that those in the trees should surrender and come to the road and that none would be harmed. Crowds of them, waving makeshift white flags, made their way out of the woods and assembled on the road. Shells then began to rain down among them, killing and maiming hundreds. When the shelling stopped, the Serb soldiers lined up the survivors and separated out all the men of fighting age. Many of them, who were identified as being leaders or high-profile members of their community, were shot or had their throats slit by the side of the road. Some of those telling the stories had seen this happen to their husbands, fathers and sons. The rest of the men were taken to newly set-up concentration camps. Huddled in their overcrowded cabins, the women told us their stories in the belief that no one in the outside world knew or understood what was happening. They would insist on sharing some of the food we had brought with us and also asked if it would be OK if they set aside a quarter of the gifts we had brought, to smuggle to refugees they knew of still in hiding in northern Bosnia-Herzegovina, who were even more hungry than them. I came away from those encounters with a mixture of feelings. Each of these horror stories made me feel more outraged and angry at these ‘barbaric Chetniks’. I found it difficult to remain impartial in this war that I had no part in, or to remember that I was only hearing one side of this tragic story. So often, too, I was deeply moved by the kindness and strength of spirit shown by those telling me their stories, and troubled by the question of forgiveness in a way I had never previously been in my life. If I was beginning to build up anger and prejudice against the Serbs who were committing these crimes, how could I, as a Christian, expect those who had actually suffered such evil to forgive? How could that be possible? How would a true peace ever be born here again?

Sometimes we would drive on east of Zagreb, navigating unsigned tracks (the old motorway had been shelled) to the city of Slavonski Brod. It lay on the banks of the River Sava, which separates Croatia from Bosnia-Herzegovina, and was being shelled and sniped at from across the slow-moving waters. The road bridges lay snapped in half in the river and all the buildings closest to its banks had planks of timber propped up to cover every window and door. After carefully unloading our food to a long line of people, who had been invited to queue at the back of our truck clutching one empty plastic carrier bag each (a self-imposed, practical way to ration their share), we were offered accommodation in a little house on a hill above the town, currently occupied by an elderly couple who were refugees from northern Bosnia-Herzegovina. Our dinner was eaten in awkward silence as all earlier attempts at communication had ended in failure (their English was even worse than our Serbo-Croat). But, afterwards, our host Mladen and I sat outside drinking Slivovitz, and after a few glasses we somehow found we began to understand each other a little. He explained to me that his house lay on the plain that we could see stretching into the distance on the other side of the river. It would now be occupied by Serbs. He had owned a little land and a few plum trees; in fact the Slivovitz we were drinking was made from their fruit. Before they finally fled, having already packed up all the belongings they could carry (including this Slivovitz), he took his axe and chopped down his precious plum trees. Some Serbs might now be living in his house but they wouldn’t be enjoying his plums. He laughed a loud bitter laugh at this point, trying to convince me, and perhaps himself too, that this was a funny story rather than one filled with burning hatred.

I began to dislike the terms ‘refugees’ or ‘displaced people’. Of course these are simply necessary, useful ways accurately to describe people who have fled their homes. But I realized that these terms, until I met the real people categorized that way, and got to know them, had begun to represent inaccurate stereotypes in my mind. In another Zagreb camp, during a conversation with a likeable, sparkly-eyed, articulate middle-aged man, I learnt that he had previously been the CEO of a haulage company with a large fleet of trucks. The fact that at that particular moment in time I was the one who happened to be driving a lorry and giving him aid, even though I had a poorer education, a much smaller experience of life and far less knowledge of how to organize the transportation of goods by truck, most certainly gave me no reason to feel in any way superior to him. Although I found it hard to admit, I had caught myself beginning to feel that way: I the giver; this stranger the receiver. I with power; he with none. I began to realize that this kind of work was a very dangerous one indeed.

Meanwhile, Marijo had found a new way to distribute our gifts of clothing to those in great need. He had come to realize that many found their newfound reliance on aid the greatest suffering of all. In order to respect their dignity, he would take over a hall or large space, and lay out the clothing on long rows of tables. He would then advertise an invitation for people to come and choose whatever they wished ‘so they could give to people they might know in great need’. Thus he found a way for people to come and select the clothing they needed and liked without public humiliation.

And so it went on, truckload after truckload, filled with an ever-growing torrent of donations from Scotland. Julie, to my delight, had indeed decided to continue helping and was now my co-driver on most journeys. As the volume of support increased it became clear to us that a very small truck was not the most cost-effective way to be transporting large quantities of goods over long distances. We needed something larger. To be able to drive the largest trucks we had to sit our Heavy Goods Vehicle driving test and so, during November of 1993, we stayed with Julie’s family in Inverness (who had been among the greatest supporters of our work before I had even met Julie) and began to take the necessary lessons. To my great discomfort, after a couple of lessons together, it became rather obvious that Julie was much better than I was at driving an articulated truck. In fact, after the first ‘lesson’ with Julie at the wheel, the instructor said to her in an incredulous tone, ‘You are kidding me on, aren’t you? You’re not a beginner, you’ve been driving these things before, haven’t you?’ My heart sank a little and I climbed into the driver’s seat for my turn.

‘You might need a little bit more work,’ he stated tactfully at the end of my drive, ‘especially on the roundabouts.’

This was kind of him given the drastic measures at least one car driver had taken to avoid being squashed by my trailer. I had not previously understood all that needs to be considered while driving a 16-metre vehicle that bends when you go round corners. At his kind words, a little knot of fear formed in my stomach and over the next couple of weeks this became something closer to panic. It was not so much thoughts of crushing a fellow roundabout user, or even demolishing a petrol station with one clumsy swish of my enormous tail, which caused me this anxiety. It was, rather, the prospect of having to tell my friends back in Dalmally the news that Julie had passed the test and I hadn’t. This would provide them with ammunition for jokes at my expense for years to come.

And indeed it has, for in the end Julie did pass her test with flying colours and I failed (yes, my trailer had strayed into another lane while negotiating a roundabout). My excuse that I was starting with a disadvantage, having passed my original driving test in an old Land Rover, in our neighbouring village of Inveraray – a village entirely bereft of roundabouts – did not wash with any of them. To my enormous relief I passed at the second attempt, and before long we had bought a huge 44-tonne articulated truck. Julie had a habit of naming all our trucks and for some reason, which I never understood, she called this one ‘Mary’, the most unlikely name I could imagine for this gigantic beast. We were delighted to discover just how much aid we could fit inside this truck, all the more so when we were suddenly immersed in a bigger wave of donations from the public than ever before.

For several months we had been closely following the disturbing events unfolding in Srebrenica. Another Muslim town in a Serbian-controlled area of Bosnia-Herzegovina, it was now surrounded by enemy forces and hugely overcrowded. Like several other towns in similar situations it had been declared a ‘safe haven’ by the UN, who promised they would ensure the safety of all those who sought refuge there. By July 1995, over 30,000 Muslims were crowded into what had previously been a tiny town in a small steep-sided valley. Each building was full of people and thousands slept outside. As the months wore on many began to die of starvation, while even more were killed by the shells being fired from the mountains above the town. Finally, while we and many in the world watched in disbelief and horror, the Serb soldiers invaded the town. The 400 Dutch UN soldiers surrendered without firing a shot. The Serbs then proceeded to select all the Muslim men of fighting age, took them to an abandoned factory and murdered over 8,000 of them in two days. Most of the women (after many had been raped) and children were left to flee through the forests. The majority of them made their way to Tuzla, the nearest large town, where a makeshift camp of tents was hastily erected at an old airfield. All of this unfolded before the eyes of the world. We were kept up to date by regular bulletins. In addition to the anger I felt at the Serbs, I now experienced a burning rage at the UN and our own government, who had simply let this pre-planned atrocity happen in a place they had the audacity to call a ‘safe haven’. I felt ashamed.

Immediately after this event donations poured in faster than ever, both from an outraged public and food companies who offered us pallets of flour, sugar, canned foods and much more. And so, with an enormous, precious cargo, we set off in our new articulated lorry, determined to get this aid to the women and children recently arrived in Tuzla – not a straightforward task given the only way to reach that town would be to cross central Bosnia-Herzegovina where the war was still raging in a complicated way. We knew our large truck was not designed for the mountain tracks that we would need to navigate and so we agreed to collaborate with another UK charity, which was using small trucks to deliver aid within Bosnia-Herzegovina.

We met them in the Croatian town of Split and, in an industrial complex, we decanted our load into their five trucks, under a searing sun. After a much-needed dip in the Adriatic we headed north, Julie and I now co-driving the smaller trucks with our new colleagues. By the second day of driving we had left behind the tarmac for safer dirt tracks in the forest. These felt familiar to me as they were similar to roads in Scotland on which I had learnt to drive as a teenager. And the surrounding landscape was familiar, too, although the mountains were a bit taller and more dramatic than those in Argyll. But I soon began to realize that these trucks, unlike the Land Rovers and pickups I was used to, were not four-wheel-drive vehicles and were clearly not designed for this terrain. The roads became rougher and steeper. Wheels began to spin and I started to worry. And my growing concern was not just caused by the unsuitable vehicles we had found ourselves in, but by a realization that among the new team we were now part of some appeared more interested in thrill-seeking than the safe delivery of aid. Just north of the city of Mostar we had seen and heard shells exploding in the distance. I was horrified to hear one of our co-drivers suggest we take a route closer to where the smoke was still rising so we ‘could see what was going on’. It appeared to me as if some of them wanted to play at being soldiers. When we stopped at UN bases to gain advice on the safest routes to proceed on, some of our co-drivers persuaded the soldiers to lend them their machine guns so they could pose for photographs.

I began to understand for the first time why the larger aid agencies often saw some smaller charities’ efforts as amateurish and dangerous. As we all settled down for the night to sleep outside, beside our row of parked trucks, Julie and I quietly discussed our misgivings about working with these people, but we realized that right now, having reached a part of central Bosnia-Herzegovina that neither of us knew, we had no real option but to go on with them towards Tuzla. And besides, we needed to tell all the donors back home that we had seen their donations arrive safely. I climbed into my sleeping bag in a bad mood. Our co-workers had not even brought decent supplies for us to eat, and going to bed hungry never failed to make me self-piteous. During the night, we awoke to find a pack of wild dogs running over us. It was the weirdest sensation. They scampered over our sleeping bags, apparently disinterested in us, and disappeared into the pitch-black. I wondered what had happened to their owners and what they were running from or to.

The next day the roads got worse. The stronger trucks were now towing others up the steepest hills and progress became painfully slow. For our own safety, we really needed to reach Tuzla before nightfall, but that looked less and less likely. As the afternoon wore on, the number of stops to repair punctures increased and I became worried that some of the trucks would simply break down beyond repair. And as the light faded, the endless black forest on each side of the road began to look a little sinister. Just as the situation started feeling very bleak, a convoy of huge ‘all-terrain’ Norwegian trucks drove up behind us. Their friendly drivers – civilians working alongside UN troops – saw our predicament and stopped to ask if they could help. They were even kind enough not to laugh at us and said they would accompany us to their base in Tuzla, towing us whenever we needed their help. With our unexpected ‘guardian angels’ pulling us on, we began to make steady progress. Finally, we arrived at the UN base at 3 a.m., where we all collapsed exhausted into a deep sleep – but not before Julie had the chance to tell me excitedly that she had driven one of the huge all-terrain vehicles on the last leg of our journey through the night. She told me this as if her biggest lifelong ambition had just come true. I began to think she might just be a little weird.

The next morning we drove into the town of Tuzla and were met by a grateful but tired-looking mayor. We happily unloaded our precious cargo – thousands of boxes of dried food, soap, nappies – into a makeshift little warehouse from where it was being brought in manageable loads to the refugees at the nearby airfield. Later, we ourselves arrived at the huge camp, now home to 30,000 people. We walked down a path between the tents. A girl was trying to wash her hair in a bucket, while nearby an old lady in a headscarf was struggling to make a fire with a little pile of cardboard. In one tent medics were examining severely malnourished children with gaunt expressionless faces. I realized it was only ten days since the fall of Srebrenica. Ten days since these women and children, sitting outside their tents, emaciated and sunburnt, had watched the murder in cold blood of their husbands, sons and fathers – and many other horrors besides. Ten days during which they had walked through the forests in terror. On the way, at least one of them, a twenty-year-old called Ferida Osmanovic, hanged herself from a tree with a scarf. And while they had endured these things, I had been moaning about my own lack of sleep and good food.

While our recent travelling companions set off on the return journey back to Split along the same the roads we had just travelled, Julie and I decided to take our chances with a military helicopter flight that the Norwegians told us about. We were advised to assemble at a nearby landing pad and wait for its arrival. The first day it never came. The soldiers waiting with us told us it was because they had been unable to find sober pilots. I had thought they were joking but the next day, when the enormous helicopter did finally land, the Ukrainian crew members who emerged to unload the cargo were clearly very drunk indeed. Our Norwegian friends had told us that no one was allowed on these helicopters unless they had a flak jacket. We had no such thing and when we explained our predicament to a friendly UN monitor, also waiting for a lift back to Split, he kindly lent us some blue postbags, saying that they were the same colour and shape as the standard flak jackets.

‘Just clutch them as you board and the crew will never notice,’ he advised us.

He was correct. As we climbed into the cavernous empty hold of the helicopter, the crew stared at us with inane drunken grins and watery eyes and I realized we probably could have been holding anything at all, or nothing, and they would have been oblivious to it. The beast swallowed us like Jonah’s whale and took off. We bounced about in the huge metal barrel, as the pilots employed ‘tactical flying’ which meant flying horribly low, hugging the hillsides and swinging from one side of the valley to the other. This presumably was necessary to reduce the risk of being shot down, but I did wonder how much of it was just caused by drunk driving. Either way I secretly wished we had decided to return by those forest tracks. But we did eventually land safely in Split and found our large truck, Mary, waiting faithfully to take us home. We would have hugged her if our arms had been long enough.



2




A Woman Clothed with the Sun (#u47ad9d26-c1c2-5610-ba61-bb4c938d2ac0)


To believe in something and not live it is dishonest.

MAHATMA GANDHI

Right through our childhood and beyond, the River Orchy was normally our friend, especially on days like this when the incessant rain and gushing feeder streams had it lapping the edge of our only road out. The prospect of a flooding river cutting us off from the rest of Dalmally was usually an exciting one, particularly when it meant a day off school. The Orchy had been a water playground running through every season of our childhood. On warm summer days we would carry our rubber dinghy up to Corryghoil, a slow-moving pool with a sandy beach, and swim in the cool deep water. Sometimes Dad would put the little boat on his old Rover trailer and take it further up the glen so we could ride it over waterfalls and beneath overhanging branches, all the way down to the old stone bridge. Occasionally in the winter the ice froze thick and we would meet our friends who lived on the other side, to ‘skate’ in our trainers or play ‘ice hockey’ with our shinty sticks and a stone for a puck. In the autumn we spent long hours trying to catch salmon as they battled upstream to spawn, our rare successes worth the wait, as we returned home victorious with a delicious silver fish and excited tales of how it had been caught.

But on this late autumn day in 1983, we worried as we watched the water’s creeping invasion of the fields below our house and noticed that neighbours Alasdair and Donald were moving their sheep to higher ground, for the following morning we were meant to be on our eagerly awaited flight to Yugoslavia. Long before the time arrived to begin our overnight drive to Heathrow Airport, the river was in full flood, the road submerged under an impassable torrent. It was then Dad explained he had thought ahead. He had parked our car earlier in the day, beyond the part of the road now flooded, and then walked back home. He handed us a torch and told us to get moving along the muddy hillside path above the flooded road. And so it was that our life-changing adventure began with a walk through darkness and driving rain, ankle-deep in mud with our luggage on our backs, while laughing at how Dad was always one step ahead.

It had all begun a few weeks earlier as we were sitting round the kitchen table after breakfast. Ruth, my sister, back home on holiday from university, looked up from her newspaper and said, ‘Look at this! It says here there are reports that the Virgin Mary is appearing to some teenagers in a place called Medjugorje in Yugoslavia!’ An excited conversation ensued. We were a devout Catholic family and knew about famous places like Lourdes where Our Lady had appeared in times gone by. We had even been, the previous year, on a family pilgrimage to the Marian shrine of Fatima in Portugal. But the idea that Our Lady could appear today, in our own time, was something that had never occurred to us before.

‘Mum, if this is even possibly true we should go,’ we implored. Our parents explained that they could not travel during the forthcoming Christmas holidays because of work to be done on the guest house (our home was a rambling old shooting and fishing lodge). We persevered and were amazed when they suggested that we should go on our own. Ruth and her boyfriend Ken were nineteen years old, while my brother Fergus and I were sixteen and fifteen respectively. Between that breakfast discussion and the day of the flood we discovered that the village of Medjugorje was near the town of Mostar but, beyond that, we hadn’t managed to locate it on a map, let alone figure out how we would travel there from the airport in Dubrovnik or where we would stay when we got there. ‘All part of the adventure,’ we thought, as did several of our cousins and a couple of university friends of Ruth and Ken’s who had asked to join us. So it was then, that ten of us, some rather muddy from the waist down, eventually boarded a flight from Heathrow to Dubrovnik.

In the stunningly beautiful walled city of Dubrovnik, perched on the edge of the sparkling blue Adriatic Sea, we managed to find a night’s lodging with a man who had only one English phrase, presumably learnt from watching American films. ‘Take it easy, sonofabitch!’ he would exclaim with a smile in answer to every question we asked of him. As far as we could understand, his boarding house was illegal, a little private enterprise that had no right to exist in this communist country. The next morning we discovered that during this holiday period there was no public transport available and eventually we resorted to hiring a couple of cars to reach our destination. Before long we were winding our way along the pretty coast and then up into steep mountains towards Mostar, all the while still laughing about the ‘sonofabitch’ man from the night before. We had been well warned that the police and communist authorities were not at all enthusiastic about the reported apparitions taking place in Medjugorje or the idea of foreigners travelling there. In fact, before our departure from Scotland, our parents had received calls from the Yugoslavian Embassy suggesting it would be irresponsible of them to allow us to go there. And so we were not terribly surprised when, a few miles from Medjugorje, we were stopped by policemen who questioned us about our reasons for being here. They let us go after a few minutes but did not look impressed when Ken had the audacity to ask them directions to the village from their roadblock.

Finally, we arrived in the little scattering of stone houses amid vineyards and fields of tobacco, and parked outside a white church with two spires that looked far too big for the tiny village around it. The other thing of immediate note was an enormous cross on top of the hill overlooking the village. On that weekday evening, we entered the church and to our amazement found it packed full. The people were saying the rosary and we could see that Mass was about to begin. It seemed nearly everyone else there was local. Tall, weather-beaten men, with huge farmers’ hands, old ladies dressed in black and families with young children sang and prayed with all their hearts. It was a Mass unlike anything we had ever experienced before and we were profoundly moved by this incredible spectacle of faith. After Mass the priest approached us, introduced himself as Father Slavko and asked us where we were from. He was amazed to hear we had travelled from Scotland and asked us where we planned to stay. We told him we didn’t know yet and he explained that there were no hotels or guest houses in the village. He introduced us to his sister and her family, who immediately insisted that we come and stay at their house. There were three sons in the family of similar ages to us, as well as their cousin Gordana, who was visiting from Australia on holiday. She patiently began translating for us, and for the next few days she never stopped! Aside from some conversations about Italian football – a shared passion of ours and the sons of the family – we talked about the extraordinary events that had been happening in this village.

They explained to us that on 24 June 1981, two teenagers from the village, while walking along the road one evening, saw a lady on the hillside who they recognized as the ‘Gospa’, the Croatian term for the Virgin Mary. The following days they were joined by four other children, who also saw her and heard her speak to them. She told them she was the Virgin Mary, the Queen of Peace. One of the first things she said to them was, ‘I have come to tell the world that God exists. He is fullness of life, and to enjoy the fullness and obtain peace you must return to God.’ From then on these six children began seeing and talking to the Virgin Mary daily and, within a few days, thousands of local people were gathering on the hillside to be with the children as they dropped to their knees and conversed with someone that all others present could not see. But as the word spread, and people from greater distances began to arrive, the communist authorities became unhappy about these public displays of religious fervour and began to clamp down. The youngsters were taken to a psychiatric hospital where they were questioned and threatened with detainment, but none retracted any part of their claims – not even the youngest of them, nine-year-old Jakov Colo. The gatherings on the hillside were forbidden but the crowds started to fill the church each evening instead, where the children now began to have their apparitions. Meanwhile, the parish priest, Father Jozo Zovko, who had initially been sceptical about the claims of the children but came to believe them, was jailed for three years because of the stand he took on their behalf. Our hosts, through the ever-patient Gordana, explained to us how this incredible chain of events had unfolded in their village and they also told us of the numerous extraordinary miracles that they, along with many other local people, had witnessed. For example, often they had seen the sun spin in the sky (reminiscent of the famous miracle witnessed by tens of thousands at Fatima nearly seventy years earlier). There had also been various healings of people with all sorts of ailments.

We were spellbound by these stories that were told to us in a calm matter-of-fact way, by a clearly sane and well-balanced family. They told us there were many other stories of miracles, and some wild rumours too, but they were only telling us things that they knew for certain to be true. We were overwhelmed by the kindness of this family. It was only after the first night we realized with huge embarrassment that they had all given us their own beds to sleep in while they slept on the floor. On the following nights of our short stay, no matter how hard we tried, we could not persuade them to let us sleep on the floor instead. The family knew the visionaries well. Marko, one of the brothers, explained to us that he was actually going out with Mirjana, the oldest of the six. They insisted on organizing for us to be there with the visionaries, in the small side room of the church, when they would have their apparition. And, sure enough, for the next two evenings we found ourselves in a little crowded room just off to the side of the altar. Along with the bigger crowd in the body of the church we prayed the rosary together with the young visionaries, who again were of similar ages to ourselves. At a certain point all the visionaries suddenly stopped praying and simultaneously looked up towards the wall. Silence descended. We watched them smiling broadly and talking, but we could not hear their words. They appeared to be in deep conversation with someone we could not see. I was sitting so close to them I could have reached out and touched Marija, as she mouthed words to someone and seemed totally captivated and delighted. This lasted for a few minutes and then the children stopped looking up and became aware again of the rest of us around them. Together we resumed and finished the rosary.

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 that 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.

The rest of our little party seemed to be having very similar experiences. We laughed so much together that week, and cried too. It was as if we were finding out who we really were.

Later in the week, we saw for ourselves the sun spinning and vivid colours radiating outwards from it across the sky. An incredible sight, but by then, given the events taking place in our own hearts, it certainly did not seem like the most amazing experience of that week.

We returned home to Scotland very tired and very happy. Mum and Dad and our grandparents, who lived with us, along with two trusted priests, awaited us armed with a tape recorder and a number of crucial questions, which they insisted we answer before we went to bed. They were determined to ensure we were not being fooled by some mischievous prank, or something worse, and they wanted to thoroughly check our information against the teaching of the Church. Mum and Dad were anything but cynical about this, though. In fact, in hindsight I think that perhaps all of us from the moment Ruth first read the little article in the newspaper at our breakfast table somehow knew in our hearts that this was true. I cannot think of any other reason for Mum and Dad encouraging us to go and see. But now they wanted to be sure, and they wanted to be well prepared to answer the questions that would undoubtedly be posed by others.

They were impressed by the information and answers we gave but, even more, in the days following, the changes they could see that had taken place in us. Their teenagers were now the ones encouraging them to spend time in prayer together – it had previously always been the other way round. They could see something profound had happened to us. Ruth, meanwhile, wrote an article about our experience, which was published by the Catholic Herald. They put our address at the end of the article and we started to receive many letters asking for more information. In fact, over a thousand arrived at our home over the coming weeks and while we headed back to university and school, Mum and Dad wrote handwritten replies to each. One letter arrived from a lady called Gay Russell in Malawi. She explained she was a pilot who flew a small plane across Southern Africa and she asked for more information. Mum sent her a letter. Of all the letters that arrived this was the one we remembered, even though we never heard from her again. The image of a lady flying around Southern Africa telling everyone about Medjugorje became a family joke. We could not know then that twenty years later, in very different circumstances, we would eventually meet Gay, in her African home, and that through that coming together something very extraordinary would happen.

Two months later, having written all their replies, Mum and Dad visited Medjugorje themselves. They had similar experiences to us there and when they returned, also convinced that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was indeed appearing on earth in our own day, with a message for humankind, they felt God was asking them to turn our family home and guest house into a ‘house of prayer’, a place where people could come on retreat and spend time with God. They began to block out some time from the normal paying guests (most of whom until then had come to fish for salmon and hunt deer) and to organize retreats. Our largest room soon became a chapel, the snooker table replaced by an altar, and, after some months, Craig Lodge the guest house, became Craig Lodge Family House of Prayer. As well as a multitude of visitors who came for a day or two, others would stay longer and soon a little community was born (the Krizevac Community, named after the hill of the cross in Medjugorje), comprising young people who came to live with us, who wished to devote time to deepen their spirituality and discern their calling in life, or who perhaps just needed a place of refuge to recover from what life had thrown at them thus far.

So our idyllic, quiet country house became a hive of activity. Having lived in a guest house or hotel since my earliest memory, I was used to others often being in our home. It was also not the first time Mum and Dad had made a dramatic decision that would alter the life of their family. Two years previously we had fostered Mark, a seven-year-old boy with a dreadful skin disease, who had been abandoned in a hospital in Glasgow. At twelve years old I was surprised and discomforted to find myself no longer the ‘baby of the family’. Suddenly we had in our midst a small boy with some serious behavioural problems, prone to spectacular outbursts of rage. We very quickly learnt from this little city kid a whole new range of swearing and ways to insult people. But Mark very soon became our much-beloved little brother and before long we adopted him. Not only did he become a permanent member of our family, but also for all of us an incredible blessing.

But Mum and Dad’s latest decision to open their doors was a new kind of invasion of our family space; a nice friendly invasion, but not one that I always found easy. The stream of house visitors was incessant and the boundaries around private family space were sometimes nebulous. Most of my social life was with friends who I had grown up with in the village of Dalmally, and as I grew into my late teens most of my time was spent away from Craig Lodge, playing sport or in the local pub. In that company I would almost never speak of my faith, the retreat centre or my experiences at Medjugorje. It was almost as if I began to lead two separate lives. I never lost my faith, and still prayed every day, but outside of my family there was no one I would speak to about this. My closest companion was my brother Fergus and together we were part of a very tight-knit group of friends who had grown up together in the village. From an early age we were all fanatical shinty players (the Highland sport with a slightly unfair reputation for violence) and most Saturdays we would turn out for our village team, Glenorchy. A close relation to the Irish game of hurling, shinty is often described by those who see it for the first time as field hockey without rules. But shinty was my passion. I loved both the game itself and the fact that nearly all my teammates were boys I had grown up with. We had won the Scottish Cup at primary school and stuck closely together ever since. Our early glory inspired us to believe that we would one day be national champions at senior level, something our village had never managed, but as the years progressed our success diminished. This was probably largely due to the amount of time we spent in our village pub rather than training on the shinty pitch.

Following the match, most Saturday evenings were spent in our local pub, or heading to one of the nearby towns and villages for a ceilidh or party. Often on Sunday mornings Fergus and I failed to get up in time for our local Mass, and so frequently Sunday afternoons were spent driving to attend an evening Mass as there was none near us. We never missed one ever, but most were attended with sore heads and parched throats. We would talk together about our faith and pray together – actually we had always done that from my earliest memory when we shared a bedroom – but we would never speak to our other friends about this part of ourselves, close though they were to us. So our double lives became more disconnected and as they did so I became less happy. But I never lost my faith or my very deep respect for my parents and their choices. I could see that what they were doing was something very beautiful, something that was changing the lives of many people. Their decisions made no worldly or economic sense; those who came to stay were invited to make a donation to cover costs, but those who could not afford to give anything were never turned away. In time, to make ends meet, they sold the salmon fishing they had owned on the Orchy and happily continued to welcome all with smiles. Mum’s home-made soup became famous far and wide; Dad’s ‘bear hugs’ even more so.

Meanwhile, I headed to Stirling University to study history, although in my heart I never wanted to leave Argyll. Much of my childhood had been spent deer-stalking and working outside and I had never held a desire to move to a city, nor had any particular career in mind. And my best friends were all staying and finding jobs around Dalmally. But I had done well in my exams at school, and because it seemed expected of me I headed off for the university. History had been my favourite subject and so I chose to study that. I did not last long in Stirling, though. I found my shyness, which I had coped with so far by staying in the company of close friends when socializing, became crippling in this new environment. I could not talk to the other students never mind make friends with them, and every weekend I would hitch-hike home to see my friends and play shinty. With my beloved Glenorchy stripes on and shinty stick in my hands, I would become happy and confident again for ninety minutes. ‘Well played, the Big Man!’ the older men watching on the sideline would shout when I won a tackle or hit the ball up the field (fortunately, teammates such as Foxy, the Heekor and Pele had earned more imaginative nicknames). Then I would travel back to the university campus and hide in my room. After six months I nearly broke my mother’s heart by giving up and dropping out. I returned to Argyll to work outside again – planting trees for the Forestry Commission, stacking timber at a sawmill and then eventually becoming a salmon farmer. For six years I was part of a small team looking after the salmon that swam in the huge net cages that floated on Loch Craignish, a secluded deep-sea loch 4 miles from the nearest tar road. It was a place of great peace and I enjoyed the quiet but strenuous daily routine. It was good place to think and pray, and the boys I worked with became good friends too. I thought I would probably spend the rest of my days living and working in this part of Scotland and most of the time I was quite happy at that prospect, although the long, dark, cold winters often prompted thoughts of exotic warmer lands and new experiences.

But then one rainy evening, in November 1992, Fergus and I walked down to our local pub for a pint. It was unusually quiet. There had been no shinty match that day because of a waterlogged pitch and very few of our mates had shown up. We began to chat about what we had seen on the television earlier that night. A news report had shown the suffering of the people in Bosnia-Herzegovina who had fled ethnic cleansing and who were now in refugee camps. The Yugoslavia we had visited as teenagers was tearing itself apart. In 1991, Slovenia and Croatia had declared themselves independent; a move which ignited a war between the Serbs, who had dominated the Yugoslav state, and those wishing to break away. A year later Bosnia-Herzegovina, home to Croats, Muslims and Serbs, exploded into civil war – a gruesome conflict played out in front of the world’s cameras. In Medjugorje, Our Lady Queen of Peace was still appearing to the same six young people, and the title she had given herself had taken on a new significance. Over the years her messages were invariably about the way to peace, about how wars would be avoided if we lived the Gospel message. Exactly ten years to the day after she appeared to those six children in Medjugorje, the first shots of the war had been fired. As the horror unfolded and a stream of reports of bloody massacres, ethnic cleansing and mass rape stunned modern-day Europe, the reason for some of Our Lady’s messages and the urgency with which she had spoken them became much more clear. Perhaps too few of those of us who had been privileged to hear and believe her messages had really ever put them into practice in our lives.

This particular bulletin had focused on a camp near Medjugorje and probably for this reason we began talking about how much we would like to help the people there. We knew of a group in London that was organizing the transport of aid to Medjugorje, and we began discussing the idea of making an appeal locally for aid and driving it out with one of these convoys. After closing time, walking back home alongside the black river which had, all those years earlier, nearly stopped us from visiting Medjugorje, we talked ever more enthusiastically about a return visit.

The next day we shared the idea with the rest of our family and almost immediately, before we could ponder it further, our little appeal was launched. Mum and Dad phoned various friends and regular visitors to the retreat centre to ask if they would help, and before long parcels of food, clothing and medicines were being delivered to our house. Donations of money also started to arrive in the post, much to our surprise. Hurriedly, Fergus and I organized a week’s holiday from the fish farms we worked on, and we used the donations of money to buy a second-hand Land Rover. We had learnt from those organizing the convoys out of London that four-wheel-drive vehicles were urgently needed for the distribution of aid in the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina. The plan, therefore, was to drive out with the convoy from London and to leave both the aid and the Land Rover in Medjugorje before flying home.

Barely three weeks after that conversation in the pub, we found ourselves driving out of London, in a dangerously overladen Land Rover, heading for Dover and then on to Bosnia-Herzegovina. Our employers hadn’t been able to give us more than a week off work at such short notice and so, to ensure we could get there and back in the time available, we had roped in some friends to drive the first leg of the journey from Dalmally to London while we flew down to cut one day off the journey.

And so it was that we arrived in Medjugorje once again, with a Land Rover bulging full of gifts for people we had never met, many of them living in abandoned railway carriages in a nearby refugee camp. This was the first time either of us had returned here since our visits in the early 1980s – our first visit here as grown men – and initially it jarred to see all the guest houses and hotels in places where there had once been only vineyards. But by the time we climbed Mount Krizevac, praying the Stations of the Cross as we went, and sat together at the foot of the enormous white cross at the summit, we knew that all of the blessings and graces we had experienced here as teenagers were being poured out for us again. We returned home with grateful hearts. And what I discovered at home surprised me. The donations of aid and money that had poured into Craig Lodge in response to our first little appeal had not stopped – in fact the trickle had become a deluge. The sheds that I had borrowed from my dad, beside Craig Lodge, were now full of medical aid, dry food, blankets and clothing. Mum and her friends were busy categorizing and packing the aid. I realized I had a decision to make and after praying and thinking about it for a few days, I handed in my resignation letter at the fish farm and put my house up for sale. It was not a difficult decision. I had for some time been searching for something else in my life and here, unexpectedly, was an opportunity. Mum had recently inherited a fairly valuable painting from a distant relative, which she sold to raise the money we needed to buy a small truck. Whenever I wasn’t sleeping in it I could sleep back home at Craig Lodge, she told me. And so with no particular time frame or ‘grand plan’ in my mind, and without any previous relevant experience, I found myself organizing the collection and delivery of aid to Bosnia-Herzegovina.



3




Little Acts of Love (#u47ad9d26-c1c2-5610-ba61-bb4c938d2ac0)


Give something, however small, to the one in need. For it is not small to the one who has nothing. Neither is it small to God, if we have given what we could.

ST GREGORY NAZIANZEN

All the while, back at home, Mum and Dad continued to phone everyone they knew. Over the years, thousands of people had stayed with them at the retreat centre and many had become dear friends. The calls, telling them about our new effort for the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina, quickly mobilized an army of co-workers. Not satisfied with that, Mum then wrote to every Catholic parish in Scotland seeking support. The response was incredible. All day long the phone rang with offers of help. Each morning the postman arrived with piles of letters containing cheques, representing personal donations, church collections or the proceeds of fund-raising events. Julie would spend hours on her typewriter writing thank-you letters, while I spent most of my time driving all over the country to pick up donations of goods and bring them back to the sheds at Craig Lodge, where we would sort through and pack them ready for shipment. It was hard work and we would not have managed without the numerous friends who helped on a regular basis. One of my favourite tasks was loading the trucks bound for Bosnia-Herzegovina. I felt a huge sense of responsibility to ensure that every last square centimetre was fully used so that each expensive, time-consuming journey delivered as much as possible to those in need. Fitting in the goods of different sizes, weights and fragility became like some kind of huge 3D jigsaw game. It was also hard physical work, something I was missing since leaving the fish farm where I had spent all day every day for six years doing physically demanding manual work. My least favourite job meanwhile was that of giving talks and presentations to people who were, understandably, asking for reports and feedback. Or more accurately, I imagined this would be my least favourite job, because for some time I managed to avoid each invitation by persuading Mum or Julie to do these talks to churches, schools or various other groups of supporters, while I conveniently prearranged to make a collection in some different corner of the country.

In Glasgow, Scotland’s largest city, a wonderful retired couple, John and Anne Boyle, came to our rescue. They set up a volunteer support group in the city, and obtained a free warehouse from the city council as well as a van to carry out local collections. Before long this became the biggest part of our operation. The free warehouse was a very welcome gift but hardly ideal in design. Our space was on the fourth floor, meaning all goods were transported in and out using a very old lift. On the days we loaded the truck for transport overseas, one team would repeatedly fill the lift on the fourth floor, before sending it down to the team below, who carried it out to the truck. More than once the lift broke down. We came to understand that the city authorities would only send out a technician immediately to repair it if there was someone stuck in the lift, otherwise we could be left for hours, or even days, without a way to complete the loading. We eventually discovered we could climb inside the stuck lift, through its roof, and sometimes resorted to doing this prior to phoning the council.

‘Yes, there is someone inside,’ we would answer honestly and accurately. I think probably they had a very good idea what we were up to, when they arrived to find one of us inside, red-faced and squeezed in beside a stack of boxes, but it seemed like they, along with everyone else in the city, just wanted to be part of the effort and keep the aid moving. While, initially, much of our support in Glasgow came through the churches, when the large Muslim community there heard of our work, they became very involved too. They organized collections of food at the mosques on a regular basis and would deliver huge quantities to our stores. Many in this Asian community, mainly of Pakistani descent, were involved in wholesale food retailing and they often donated us their surplus stocks. But we could never get enough dried and tinned food. It was always top of the lists of urgent requests we were being sent from Bosnia-Herzegovina. We began to approach supermarkets and seek their permission to carry out food collections. They would allow us to park an empty shopping trolley at their entrance and hand leaflets to customers entering the store, inviting them to buy an item on our list and deposit it in the trolley on the way out. A small team of us would target a different store every weekend with this approach and the willingness of people to donate this way amazed us. It was efficient, too, as a team in the back of our van would categorize and pack each product separately as it came in. We usually returned to the warehouse late in the evening with full boxes ready to deliver, marked Tinned veg, Pasta, Sugar and so on. Nearly all the boxes we used as packaging were donated by whisky distillers. They were strong boxes, ideal, but could cause huge excitement and consternation at border posts. Customs officials and police would stand open-mouthed when we responded to their requests to open the back of our truck for inspection, their immediate assumption being that these ‘humanitarians’ were actually whisky smugglers. They usually seemed a little disappointed when we opened the boxes to reveal their more mundane contents. As time went on we became aware of another interesting pattern at the supermarket collections. At those in the deprived areas of Glasgow – often housing schemes with some of the worst rates of unemployment and poverty in the UK – we noticed that we would be donated significantly more than at those in the more affluent suburbs. Not something I can pretend to explain the reasons for, but something real and quite marked none the less.

I found ‘giving patterns’ a little harder to predict while doing street collections for money. This was an activity I enjoyed much less than the supermarket collections. Somehow it always seemed harder to ask a stranger for money than for food. Even though it should have been obvious that this was not a personal plea, there was something about rattling a can while saying ‘please help the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina’ I found very difficult. There was a little humiliation involved; perhaps the tiniest taste of what it must feel like to have to beg for your own needs. To pass the long hours on the pavement I would sometimes enter into a private game of guessing the response of each pedestrian as they walked towards my solicitation. The guy with the muscles and tattoos; the woman pushing the pram; the schoolkids on their lunch break; the busker who had looked annoyed by my presence on ‘his patch’. Each one would, more often than not, surprise me. I could not form any conclusions on categories of people and the likelihood of them dropping some coins in my can. And I could not compare and distinguish giving patterns between men and women, young and old, meek-looking and fierce, or the singers of old depressing Scottish songs and upbeat-but-off-key bagpipe players. I am sure others have carried out more scientific experiments in this matter, and could therefore prove me wrong, but I certainly concluded that people of all sorts could be extremely generous and extremely mean. Our experience of this even included the potential of a much more controversial comparison when we were given permission to do a street collection outside the national football stadium before a Scottish Cup Final, which was to be contested by the two giants of Scottish Football, Glasgow Rangers and Glasgow Celtic. Rivalry between these two teams has a reputation for being perhaps the fiercest in world football, representing as they do the Protestant and Catholic communities of the West of Scotland and the rather unsavoury, historical baggage that goes with that. So it was with some trepidation we ventured out with our collecting cans among the swarming fans, approaching the stadium in their tens of thousands. I wondered if they would even notice our presence or hear our invitation. They certainly did and their giving was incredible – the most generous we had seen. I suspect there may have been a competitive element involved. Perhaps they thought we would keep separate totals for amounts donated by fans wearing blue and those wearing green and publish it for the world to see. Or maybe it is just that pre-match beer helps open hearts and wallets. Whatever the reasons (and I am sure in reality they were much more laudable than those I mention), we collected a record total in a very short space of time as the fans entered the stadium. The link with those Glasgow football clubs actually has continued in various ways ever since.

A couple of years after that event I was introduced to two famous former footballers, Frank McGarvey and Gordon Smith, who used to play for Celtic and Rangers respectively. They decided to organize a match between former players of both clubs to raise funds for us. As a Celtic fan myself and a lover of football, I could not have been more excited. They booked a small stadium in the East End of Glasgow and phoned their old friends from both clubs. Many famous players agreed to play. The day before the event I chatted briefly to Frank about some last-minute arrangements. I asked him how his team was shaping up.

‘Not too great, actually,’ he replied. ‘A few have called off at the last minute. You better take your boots along yourself.’

I laughed.

‘No, I’m not joking. Take your boots. You’re a big lad and you told me you could play a bit.’

He hung up. I stopped laughing. Then I phoned around my friends to tell them the news. Then I looked for my old boots, which had not been usefully employed for some time. The next day I found myself sitting in a dressing room with a group of players who had all been boyhood heroes of mine, talking about tactics and how to beat Rangers. I remembered having lots of dreams just exactly like this when I was young. This was very strange indeed.

‘Where do you like to play?’ asked Frank as he began to organize his team, and I realized he was talking to me.

‘Umm, up front – striker.’

‘Great. You and I will play up front together.’ He smiled. ‘Don’t worry. I’ll keep you right.’

And so it was that I ended up playing in a Celtic–Rangers match. Actually, I was playing directly against one of their most famous former players and recent captain of the national English team, Terry Butcher. He was a big man. I think he went easy on me during the game, although his kindness didn’t extend to letting me have many touches of the ball. In truth I didn’t play very well, missing a couple of chances that I should have scored. And we lost the match. A few of my friends from Dalmally had travelled down to watch me, something that meant a lot to me, although afterwards in the bar they had some fun analysing my performance.

This whole experience felt like God was giving me a little treat. A wonderful, surprise gift. Something completely unexpected but connected to some heartfelt desire (even a childish one that I might not dare to articulate as an adult) or longing of mine that only He understood. And a sense that He wanted me to know that He understood me. And this has happened to me many times since. Undeserved, unexpected, gratuitous gifts that can only be unwrapped when feeling like a small child.

Meanwhile there were lots of things to do which were a little less exciting. Now that this work seemed to have developed into an ongoing mission we realized we needed to register a charity. Originally the name we had written on the side of our old truck was Scottish Bosnia Relief. When the word ‘Bosnia’ became politically sensitive during the war, it began to create a risk when we drove through certain areas or border crossings and so we scrapped off those particular letters. After some time we decided to paste the word International in the untidy space between Scottish and Relief. After all, we reasoned, we were delivering goods to Croatia as well as Bosnia-Herzegovina, and who knew where else in the future? So we had named the organization: Scottish International Relief. My brother, Fergus, then spent some time doodling various ideas for a logo. We choose a blue Celtic cross he had drawn, with the letters SIR – the acronym we became known by for many years – written on it. This ancient symbol, a cross on top of a smaller circle, is a very familiar sight across Scotland and Ireland, representing the transition by our ancestors from Paganism to Christianity, from worship of the sun (the circle) to worship of Jesus (the cross). Next we needed a slogan, and once again round the family table we bandied about different ideas, finally agreeing on ‘Delivering Hope’. ‘Hope’ has always been my favourite word. We also briefly discussed whether this work should be an extension of Craig Lodge Family House of Prayer – which had existed as a registered charitable organization for several years – and therefore a Catholic organization, or whether we should be non-denominational. While we all felt this was a work of God and a fruit of Medjugorje, we also felt unanimously and strongly that this should be an organization open to people of all faiths and none. And so we set up a new non-denominational charity and, in addition to members of our family, we invited on to the first board two non-Catholic friends who had already done a huge amount of work. We worked with a lawyer in our nearest town, Oban, to write up a constitution and at our first, rather informal meeting we elected my brother-in-law Ken, Ruth’s husband, as Chairperson. This board would meet three or four times a year, while Julie and I, with huge support from Mum and Dad (despite the fact they were also running the retreat centre) did the daily work, with the help of a multitude of volunteers.

Julie, who among her other gifts fortunately had a talent for administration, took responsibility for thanking donors and recording their names and addresses. I did most of the driving within Scotland to collect the aid donations, as well as the planning and preparation for deliveries. This included communicating with our partners on changing areas of need, request lists, customs paperwork, route planning and trying to repair holes in the roof of our truck. I also wrote the appeals and newsletters we began to send to our growing band of supporters, and to my surprise found I enjoyed this very much. In fact, to make ends meet (I was still an unpaid volunteer living off my savings and Mum and Dad’s free lodging), I began writing a few articles on other unrelated topics and sold them to various publications. And, of course, a huge amount of our time was spent driving the truck back and forth across Europe. In the year since our first trip with the Land Rover I had driven to Bosnia-Herzegovina over twenty times.

While I learnt things every time I made one of those deliveries, I was learning at least as much from people who, in all sorts of incredible ways, were supporting our work at home. I was very deeply moved and challenged by some of the generosity that I experienced.

Mrs Duncan Jones lived in a little cottage – the sort you read about in fairy tales – at the end of a very rough track near the village of Kilmartin. We always enjoyed visiting her with our van to collect various goods – both her own donations and things she had collected from friends in the area. Each time we visited her she would give us wonderful bowls of home-made soup, and, ‘in order to provide sustenance on the journey to Bosnia’ she baked us the most delicious fruitcakes I have ever tasted. These cakes contained a truly amazing quantity of brandy. She would sometimes leave them for us to collect at a particular filling station on our road to Glasgow, neatly wrapped, along with a note of encouragement. Her husband, an Episcopalian minister, died shortly after we met her but her hard work and support of our efforts never wavered. Once, I remember visiting her to collect yet another pile of donations. When she served me my soup I noticed that, rather than a ladle, she used an old mug to fill my bowl. I began to look around her kitchen at her empty cupboards and shelves, and noticed nearly everything was gone. Worried, I asked her if she was OK.

‘Yes, fine,’ she smiled.

‘Are you moving house?’ I enquired.

‘No, no. I love it here. No, I just thought about those families in Bosnia returning to their homes with nothing at all. They need these sorts of things more than I do now. I mean, does an old lady like me, living on her own, really need a ladle? Or extra plates and pots?’

I trundled down the hill from her home, my van full of her household belongings and carefully wrapped cake on the seat beside me. In my rear-view mirror I could see Mrs Duncan Jones waving. She wore a wonderful huge smile.

I was being challenged in lots of other ways too. A few weeks prior to this, Julie and I (by now engaged to be married) were chatting on the last leg home from another trip to Bosnia-Herzegovina and she gently began to question me about my shyness – and my clothes. I had, to her dismay, just told her, quite smugly, that I could fit all of the clothes I owned (apart from my kilt) into one washing-machine load. For her, it was a horrible realization that I didn’t look this bad just because I was currently driving and loading trucks all day.

‘Well, I suppose that is why all of your clothes are that same sort of horrible grey colour,’ she said dryly after a short silence.

‘What do you think you will do after this finishes? Will you go back to being a fish farmer?’ she asked me.

‘I really just don’t know,’ I replied after a little thought. ‘What I am sure of, though, is that it won’t be something that has anything to do with people!’

As the months went on, however, and I had to spend more time speaking to people I didn’t previously know, I very slowly grew in confidence. With Julie’s encouragement I would sometimes even relent and give talks to some of the support groups. And I found myself even beginning to enjoy some of these encounters and the sense that I had a particular thing that I could do – and do well. I found our supporters were hungry for information about our latest aid deliveries. We started taking pictures and bought an old slide projector so we could illustrate our presentations. And we developed our newsletters to include pictures. I began to derive an enormous sense of purpose from being able to communicate the needs and words of those who were suffering to those who wanted to help them. For a little while I thought that perhaps I could try to become a journalist. One day I noticed a fish-farming magazine advertising for a reporter and I applied. To my surprise they asked me over to Edinburgh for an interview. The two men across the table were complimentary about some samples of my writing that I had sent them and it seemed to be going well. Then they posed me a hypothetical question.

‘What would you do,’ they asked, ‘if you came across evidence that a product sold by a company, who had a very substantial advertising account with this magazine – say a chemical used for getting rid of parasites on salmon – was having a hugely detrimental effect on wild shellfish in the area?’

‘Of course I would write a factually correct, well-researched article, exposing this. It would be an important story to tell,’ I said with some relish, not for one second thinking that, to them, my answer was hopelessly naive. But then I noticed them looking at each other, one with raised eyebrow, the other smirking. Too late, I realized that my fantasies of writing award-winning journalism as a weapon of truth and justice were not necessarily compatible with writing for a Scottish fish-farming magazine. Julie was waiting for me outside and when I told her what had happened we laughed so much, realizing that our hearts had never really been in it. In fact our hearts were not really in anything outside of the work we were already doing. And in Julie I had a fiancée who not once, ever, expressed any concern about our future financial security or well-being.

However, we were running out of money. It was a year since I had given up my job. We needed to make some choices. The board of trustees proposed that I start to take a small salary so that this work, which was growing steadily, could continue. Eventually, after much discussion, thought and prayer, I accepted. It was a very difficult decision. This had not been part of the original plan, and to take even a small portion of the money given us in order to support myself made me feel very uncomfortable. We wanted our organization, and still do to this day, to be as low-cost and as reliant on volunteers as possible. But the alternative was for me to go back to another job and for us to wind down the organization, just at a time when more and more people were supporting us and encouraging us to go on. And one small salary represented a very small percentage of the value of donations. So I accepted the offer and I am very glad I did.

We continued, relentlessly, to look for the most effective ways to deliver the aid that people kept entrusting us with. I was happy that our new bigger lorry had reduced the costs of transport significantly, but now I became bothered that we were driving back across Europe on each return trip with a huge empty trailer. I began asking people if there was anything someone would pay us to carry back from Eastern Europe to help offset costs. Around this time I came to know Sir Tom Farmer, perhaps Scotland’s best-known entrepreneur and founder of Kwik Fit, the enormous car tyre and exhaust-fitting company. He had, years previously, visited Mum and Dad at our retreat centre in Dalmally and been very kind in supporting them. It turned out that at this time he was importing lots of tyres to Scotland from Slovenia and northern Italy. He was happy for us to carry some of these as ‘return loads’ back to his Kwik Fit depots and to pay us the going rate. Sir Tom became a great friend and mentor over the next few years, giving me his time whenever I asked, and some hugely important words of wisdom.

‘Target your values, don’t value your targets,’ he told me when I mentioned growth figures or ambitious plans. On other occasions, when I talked of new ideas, he would refocus me by saying, ‘Magnus, just stick to the knitting!’

The return loads worked wonderfully well and, in time, through agents, we also began to arrange other cargo (refrigerators, flat-pack furniture, etc.) that we could carry back. To do this we had to obtain an Operator’s Licence to run a haulage company, which necessitated me doing some study on international haulage and passing an exam. The return loads worked really well in offsetting much of the cost of transport, but before long I realized that I was now spending most of my time running a trucking company. I felt that was not what I should be doing with my time. So I began to think about it the other way round. I observed on our journeys that there were lots of Eastern European trucks delivering goods to the UK. They must also have empty trailers to fill on their return journeys? And so that is what we began to do. Now that we had established, trusted partners, like the Family Centre in Zagreb, we could load a Croatian truck in Scotland and pay them a very reasonable cost to transport it for us. This became our preferred way of working, allowing us to concentrate on raising awareness of our work, collecting aid and thanking our donors. It also enabled us to cope with the ever-increasing scale. By the peak of our aid deliveries, during the Kosovo crisis in 1999, we were loading a 40-tonne truck almost every day for two consecutive months, from four Glasgow warehouses. We asked a radio station in Glasgow to make an appeal for more volunteers, and over just one weekend 500 people registered at our warehouses to help pack and sort the goods. These trucks took the aid by road to Split where, with the help of the redoubtable Dr Marijo, our trusted friend in Croatia, it was transferred to ships for the final leg of the journey into Albania, where huge numbers of refugees from Kosovo were arriving.

Also, the kind of aid we sent evolved as we went on. As stability returned to certain areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, some refugees began returning to homes that had been damaged and looted. An urgent need grew for the things they required to start life again. Now our trucks began to carry cutlery, kitchen utensils and tools.

One group of people who were grappling with the possibility of a return home were good friends of ours. They were Bosnian Muslim refugees living in Glasgow. They had fled their hometown, Bosanski Petrovac, which lay in a Serb-controlled part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1992, and eventually arrived by chance in Glasgow, having been evacuated by the UN. It was there, when they began coming to our warehouse to volunteer their time to help prepare the aid donations for shipment to their homeland, that we got to know them. They became part of the ‘team’ of warehouse volunteers and told us that being able to do this gave their broken lives a purpose. Not only were they struggling to learn English and adapt to a foreign culture; they were also finding life on the seventeenth floor of a block of flats in the city very different from their former rural existence. There were twelve of them, all closely related, and sometimes we invited them up to visit us in Dalmally where they would enjoy barbecues with us. Suad, and his wife Zlata, who had a young son, were about our age and we became friends. As their English improved, they wanted to tell us more about what had happened to them. They explained that before the war their village had been home to Serbs and Muslims who had lived peacefully together. Many of their neighbours were Serbian whom they had known all their lives.

‘We were just working in the fields like normal,’ Suad explained. ‘Shooting just started. There was tension in the village. We all knew what was happening in other parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But even one week before we had been invited to a party at the house of our Serb neighbours. The shots were coming from near that neighbour’s house, beside our field. My father and my brother Mersad fell. They were bleeding. I was hit too.’ He pointed to the scars on his withered arm.

‘My brother Mersad took a long time to die. He kept shouting “Suad, help me,” but I couldn’t. I was all bloody too.’

‘We were watching it all happen from our house,’ Zlata said quietly. ‘We wanted to run out to them in the field but the Serb was shooting from some bushes nearby. He would have killed us. Edin, Mersad’s son, was ten. He kept on trying to run out to his dad and we had to hold him back. Eventually when it became dark Suad managed to crawl home.’

The next day they squeezed on to overcrowded buses provided by the UN to evacuate them to Zagreb. They were shot at by Serbs and endured an appalling journey in the heat, without food or water.

‘I had to use my shirt as a nappy for Zlatan – he was still a baby then,’ Zlata told us through tears.

By 1995, the fortunes of war began to change and the Serbs had largely lost control of that part of Bosnia-Herzegovina. We were able to begin sending trucks of aid into the city of Bihac, which had endured a horrific three-year siege, and then to our friends’ hometown of Bosanski Petrovac. Suad began to receive messages from people who had already returned home to their town, urging them to come back too. And so, despite having no savings, no paid employment opportunities there, no assurance of safety, only a badly damaged home and some fields that might now have mines in them, they decided to go home. And we decided to go with them. We filled a large truck with all the belongings they had accumulated in Glasgow, as well as various other goods and tools to help them begin their lives again from scratch. Meanwhile, we had also been donated a minibus for a psychiatric hospital in Croatia to which we regularly delivered aid, and so we formed a plan for me to drive the group home in that minibus and then leave it at the hospital before flying home. The BBC heard of our plan and decided to make a documentary about our journey. And so, for the benefit of the cameramen, we waved goodbye to the bulging truck as it departed ahead of us from our Glasgow warehouse, and climbed into our bus. The group ranged from a two-year-old to an elderly granny. We headed south towards the ferry and Europe.

On arrival in Belgium we stopped at the customs post to show our passports. The police studied the Bosnians’ papers and were clearly unhappy. They asked questions and made phone calls. They told us the papers were valid for entry into Croatia and Bosnia-Herzegovina only, but not for transiting the European countries in between. They decided to deport us back to the UK. We also asked questions and made phone calls, but to no avail, and later we found ourselves travelling back on the boat to England. I realized the Bosnians had no homes to return to in Glasgow and that their belongings were already well on their way to Bosnia-Herzegovina, along with the BBC film crew. I phoned Julie to check what money we had left in our bank account and what flights from Heathrow would cost. We calculated that we had just enough to fly the whole group to Zagreb. So I drove them to Heathrow Airport from the ferry terminal and put them on their plane. I then headed south again, catching my third cross-Channel ferry in two days, and pointed my bus towards Zagreb. By now I could drive to our various destinations in the former Yugoslavia without needing a map, and this time it was pleasing to see just how quickly I was transiting countries compared to the slower pace of progress I had become used to in the lorry. Meanwhile Julie arranged for the Bosnian families to be met by Marijo on their arrival in Zagreb, who took them home to stay with them while waiting for me to catch up. When I finally did arrive the next day, they all climbed back in the bus for the final leg of their emotional journey over the border into Bosnia-Herzegovina. It amazed me, when I finally watched the documentary broadcast by the BBC about this journey, to see how skilfully they pieced together the footage so there was no hint of the deportations and flights that had occurred in between the Glasgow departure and the arrival into Bosnia-Herzegovina!

After the usual checking of papers at the Bosnian border we were finally waved through. As we entered Bosnia-Herzegovina, Zlata broke the silence with a cry.

‘We are no longer refugees!’

Everyone in the bus was crying. And the sobs grew louder when we finally reached Bosanski Petrovac, which was in ruins. Every building was covered in bullet holes and many houses had been reduced to pitiful piles of rubble.

The welcome they received from dear friends they had not seen for over three years was full of raw emotion. There was so much news to exchange. So many terrible things experienced that they had never had a chance to discuss and to try and understand. So many changes, too, in their old town. The Serbs were now gone. The town was now Muslim in a way it never had been before. A new mosque was being built even while many of the houses still lay in ruins. For Muslims like those I had just arrived with, their religion had not been something they previously practised. In fact I had met some young Muslims during the war who told me they never even knew they were Muslim before the war. Only their surname denoted their religion and sometimes sealed their fate. Bosnanski Petrovac might be home, and their hearts rejoiced at being back, but in some ways it was an alien land. I felt a little awkward. These encounters and exchanges that I found myself in the midst of were so personal and intimate that I wanted to leave them to work through it without me, however they could.

I left Bosanski Petrovac very early the next morning, leaving Suad and his family sleeping in their own home. I should have felt elated, but my drive was not a comfortable one. I travelled for many miles through a countryside and villages utterly devoid of people. Wild dogs, the only other sign of life, roamed amid the rubble and rubbish. This was part of the krajina, an area occupied by the Serbs for most of the war. They had only recently been defeated here and I became increasingly scared as I drove through this wasteland on my own. I began to doubt whether those in Bosnanski Petrovac, only recently returned themselves, had been well-informed when they advised me it would be safe to drive this route to Croatia and the Adriatic coast, where the hospital was awaiting the minibus. And given the lack of road signs, and any other way of checking I was on the right road, I began to fear I would drive into an area where I should not be welcome. The hours went past without seeing a human. As well as fear, a new overwhelming loathing for war and its futility rose in me. I wondered what would become of all the Serbs who had now been forced to flee the empty houses by the side of road and the villages to which they had belonged for generations. It was clear there were no winners in this war, only people taking their turn to lose in very horrible ways.

Eventually, I did find my way out of the mountains of Bosnia-Herzegovina and that same evening I found myself in a different world, eating delicious fish by the sparkling Adriatic with some friends from the hospital, who rejoiced over their new bus.

It was only on the flight home that I remembered our bank account. The £4,200 we had spent on plane tickets to Zagreb had left us with almost nothing. The aid donations would be piling up. I began to wonder how we would pay some outstanding bills and find a way to finance the next delivery. When I arrived back, a smiling Julie could not wait to tell me her news.

‘A cheque arrived this morning from a priest in Ireland. We don’t know him. He doesn’t want a thank-you letter. He wants this to remain anonymous,’ she said, her voicing cracking with emotion. ‘It is for £4,200.’



4




Suffer Little Children (#u47ad9d26-c1c2-5610-ba61-bb4c938d2ac0)


First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.

MAHATMA GANDHI

It took me a long time to decipher how the jumble of numbers on my train ticket related to the carriages, compartments and bunk beds of a night train pulling out of Bucharest railway station, bound for Transylvania, just before midnight, on a very cold and dark April night in 1998. When I eventually found the right compartment I was dismayed to discover it full of young Romanian soldiers drinking beer. They did not look particularly happy when I entered and I felt a little intimidated. It took lengthy persuasion and much pointing at my ticket (they didn’t have English and I had no Romanian) before a young, well-built man with a shaven head gave up my bed upon which he had been sitting. As the train chugged through an area of bleak-looking high-rise flats in the suburbs of the capital city, one of the soldiers surprised me by offering me a swig of his beer. I accepted and just as I was handing the bottle back the window of our carriage smashed inwards. A small rock landed on the floor between the bunks and shattered glass sprinkled the cabin. The reaction of my travel companions suggested this was just an act of random vandalism, but as the cold night air rushed into our compartment, and we did our best to snuggle under our meagre blankets, I questioned the wisdom of travelling to this country I knew so little about. But then I remembered the email that had led me here. I had received it, out of the blue, a few weeks earlier from an American lady called Kristl Killian. She introduced herself as a volunteer who was working with children in Romania who had been abandoned in hospitals in the city of Targu Mures, and she was making a desperate plea for us to send basic supplies.




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