Great interview with Magnus
www.dailyrecord.co.uk/news/real-life/meet-mr-marys-meals-charity-5706556Meet Mr Mary's Meals: Charity hero Scot who helps feed a million kids each dayHUMBLE dad and Mary's Meals founder Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow is having a global impact from his shed in Argyll. But despite helping to feed a million kids a day and providing life-saving aid in areas stricken by AIDS and Ebola, he may well be the world's most reluctant hero.
ON Time magazine’s list of the world’s 100 most influential people, there are more obvious candidates than Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow .
Barack Obama and the Pope you would expect, along with Angela Merkel. And then there are the pop culture giants such as Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.
Many of those on the list are fuelled by fame and ambition, and most have vast riches.
But Mary’s Meals founder Magnus is a bit different, in that he has none of the above.
In a world where some charity bosses earn more than heads of state, this 47-year-old former fish farmer and father of seven drives a clapped-out Volkswagen Golf with more than 120,000 miles on the clock – a fact that came to light only because the car broke down on the way to our interview.
Magnus earns less than the average banker’s bonus – less than £50,000, in fact.
And despite his charity going global, he may well be the world’s most reluctant hero – but that he undoubtedly is, as highlighted by the fact that he was named one of the top 10 CNN Heroes in the American TV network’s annual awards in 2010.
As the head of Mary’s Meals, Magnus has quietly gone about his business in some of the world’s no-go zones, including countries ripped apart by conflict such as Somalia and Bosnia.
He has also provided life-saving aid in areas stricken by famine and epidemics such as AIDS and Ebola.
When Magnus started Mary’s Meals in 2002, his main depot for local donations was his dad’s ramshackle shed in Dalmally, Argyll.
He and his brother Fergus also used the shed to store the supplies they collected prior to their first mission to deliver aid to Bosnia 10 years earlier, which started Magnus on a path he just couldn’t get off.
And that unlikely, lopsided structure remains the nerve centre for the charity’s work, despite the fact that their global operation will soon be providing a nutritious meal in a place of education to a million children in troubled nations every day.
Magnus has now written The Shed That Fed a Million Children, which tells how he was inspired to devote his life to battling hunger after a visit to Malawi in 2002, where a starving child, Edward, told him: “I would like to have enough food to eat and I would like to be able to go to school one day.”
The power of the message lay in its simplicity and the no-frills ethos that was inscribed on Magnus’s heart has managed to stream 93p in every pound donated into feeding children in places such as Malawi, Burma, India and Haiti.
The shed remains a massive symbol of what Mary’s Meals is all about. It’s also where he wrote his autobiography.
He is very clear that the spirit of charity in Scotland is what made Mary’s Meals work, adding: “I sincerely don’t think Mary’s Meals could have been born anywhere else.
“We had groups of people giving up their time to go collecting at supermarkets in areas that might be thought of as deprived. But these very people seemed to care most and they engaged with so many people in their communities.”
Magnus may find himself surrounded by stars on occasion but he has not quite nailed the celebrity hobnobbing.
Talking about going to the Time 100 Gala in New York last month, he admitted: “I’m a bit of a joke in my family, because I don’t really know who famous people are.
“I don’t get much time to watch the telly. But I know that Kanye West and Kim Kardashian were there – even I have heard of them.”
In his book, Magnus also tells how he tried to invite Billy Connolly’s wife Pamela Stephenson to an event but got mixed up and invited Pamela Anderson instead – although the Baywatch star was very welcome when she turned up.
One celebrity to go well beyond the call of duty for Mary’s Meals was Hollywood superstar Gerard Butler, who took Magnus under his wing at the CNN Heroes Awards in LA in 2010.
Magnus said: “I was at this ridiculously high-powered bash and feeling a bit silly, like a fish out of water, but he came over and it quickly transpired that we were guys from the west coast of Scotland, of the same age, who both support Celtic, so we had loads to talk about.
“He is a very engaging person and even at that stage he said he’d love to come and visit our wee office in Dalmally and come and see one of our projects in Africa.
“I never thought for a minute any of that would happen – but he did at the next opportunity. He turned up out of the blue with his mother, whom he’d said right from the start was a fan of Mary’s Meals. It was a great gesture.
“He also signed up to visit Liberia and he gave so much spirit to his time there. He was on the case from first thing in the morning to last thing at night, mingling with people and getting involved.”Magnus’s travels have probably notched up more than a million air miles, or truck miles, but his journey is far from over.
A reminder of the iron grip poverty and starvation has on the world came during a recent encounter in Malawi with Edward, the boy who ignited his extraordinary vocation.
Despite uttering the simple words – the dream of having a life of education and daily food – that underpins the mission statement of Mary’s Meals, Edward still lives in a state of terrible poverty.
Magnus said: “I met Edward in 2002, after his father had died of AIDS the year before, and he lived with five siblings and his mother Emma in abject poverty in a mud-brick house.
“Emma also had AIDS and did not have long to live.
“I was introduced to him again recently and I have to say that his story is unsettling for me and very poignant, because it reminds me how much there is still to be done.
“He is still living a life of terrible poverty and working the fields every day to get enough food to survive.
“Mary’s Meals didn’t reach him in time but his youngest siblings have been helped in their schools and his son will soon be going to a school where they serve Mary’s Meals too, so I guess we have helped him.”
Magnus added: “Edward is very aware of what his words led to, thank God, and I think he is proud of that.
“When I went back and spoke to him, he had heard of Mary’s Meals but he didn’t know that they had anything to do with him.
“I do often wish that we did more for Edward, because his words were the catalyst for so much work by so many people.
“His story shows that there is so much still to do.”
The Shed That Fed a Million Children: The Extraordinary Story of Mary’s Meals is available on May 21, published by Harper Collins.