Magnus Macfarlane-Barrow’s first experience of delivering aid was to drive a Land Rover stuffed with food, clothing and medicine from the Highlands of Scotland down to Bosnia. At the time he was a salmon farmer : he had taken simply a week’s vacation to do it. When he got back, his folks shed was bulging with aid that had poured in from pals and friends of friends. He quit his job, sold his place, and learned to drive related lorries. Now, about twenty years after, his charity Mary’s Meals feeds half-a-million youngsters each day.
But that’s not the beginning of the story. At least, not how Magnus tells it. The genuine beginning was ten years back when he was fourteen, and he went on a pilgrimage to a little town called Medjugorje.
I meet Magnus for tea near London Victoria. He is tall and in a suit ; his hair is greying a bit at the sides. He asserts he finds it tough to describe the effect that first trip had on him. “It was something in my heart an experience of God’s grace,” he asserts. Later on he describes it as “something God seems to do for many folks there : [he] gives them an awareness of his devotion to them”.
It is a madcap journey : ten of his family and friends, all kids, turned up at Medjugorje without anywhere to stay. They had read an article about 6 children having visions of the Virgin Mary and thought if it was probably true they should visit. They flew in to Dubrovnik and drove there in two hire autos (harder than it sounds, since their map failed to have Medjugorje on it).
After evening Mass a friar, Fr Slavko Barbarous, came over to them and introduced them to his sister, who they ended up staying with for the week and who had kids their age. It was, Magnus announces, an “amazing mix of the mystical and the mundane” one minute they’d be chatting to Bosnian youngsters about Italian football and the following “we’d all be talking about the fact that one of them was going out with one of the visionaries”.
At the time the 6 alleged idealists were teens, too. They invited Magnus’s group into the room where they were having apparitions of the Virgin Mary each evening. Magnus knows 2 of them still.
What struck him, though, was not the visionaries themselves they were “very nice, terribly standard people” but the faith of the townspeople and the way that they answered to what the 6 children were pronouncing.
“By the time I came home,” he asserts, “I had the belief that Our Woman actually was appearing in Medjugorje and that she was appearing with a message for the whole world.”
He asserts that he needed to try, “in whatever way I could, to retort to her invite to put God back at the centre”.
About a decade later Magnus was in a pub with his bro Fergus. They were talking about a stories item they had seen about refugees near Medjugorje in the Bosnian war. And that is when they thought about driving aid there themselves.
Magnus tends to play down his role in all this. Once the donations came pouring in, he asserts, “it was tougher to stop than it had been to start”. Giving up his place and job was no big sacrifice, he insists. He’d been a salmon farmer for 6 years and was “looking to do something else anyway”.
After twenty minutes or so of talking Magnus, though extremely mild-mannered, talks at an amazing pace we don’t forget to pour the tea. Over the next ten years, he explains, his charity Scottish World Relief brought aid to Bosnia, built care houses in Romania and worked in Liberia and some place else.
His stories pour out and are some of the most moving I’ve ever heard. He talks about 11-year-old Romanian orphans so neglected they could not walk properly. The kids, all HIV positive, had been deserted in infirmaries and no one had lifted them out of their cots long enough for them to learn. The doctors, he asserts, “couldn’t see any worth in those youngsters at all and they were dying, numbers of them, each week”.
Magnus recalls an exchange with one doctor who said : “I do not know why you are building these [care] homes for these kids.” Pointing to one girl, Juliana, he said : “She’ll be dead before you even finish building them.” Now, Magnus claims, “Juliana’s a young lady, and one or two summers gone I went back for the weddings of three of those girls. It’s been a miracle to me because we thought we were building a hospital where they might have a dignified death so actually it has been a superb thing that all of them are still alive.”
Magnus has lots of these stories, and is used to telling them, I believe. He gives talks in schools and to fund-raising groups. He asserts at 1 time : “I’m sure there’s only so much of all this stuff you would like, because there’s a large amount of it.” as reported tagza.com.
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