Magnus MacFarlane Barrow is the chief executive of Mary’s Meals, which provides a meal a day, in school, for children in some of the world’s poorest communities, including the slums of Port-au-Prince. He has visited Haiti several times since last January’s earthquake and was made an OBE in this year’s New Year’s Honours list.
A few days after the earthquake, we huddled in Father Tom Hagan’s little courtyard amidst the dark, devastated city. Around us we could hear gunfire, the roar of helicopters flying in and out of Port-au-Prince airport, and people’s screams, moans and angry shouting.
My friends, Father Tom Hagan and Doug Campbell, whose organisation, Hands Together, we partner in Haiti, had a few days earlier crawled from their collapsed house (the pile of rubble beside us) with minor injuries. Two of the seminarians living with them had not escaped and simple crosses marked their graves nearby.
Despite their recent experiences – or perhaps because of them – Fr Tom and Doug had already understood, more deeply than I (who had only flown in to join them that day), that any response we could make to the suffering around us could only be very small indeed in relation to the scale of the horror. They had begun to use the phrase ‘humility in action’ to describe the way we should think about our work – meaning that we needed to be very clear about understanding our own smallness and limitations before deciding what course of action to take.
In one corner of the yard, beside the temporary head office of Hands Together, Fr Tom had created a little chapel out of things salvaged from his ruined house – a rocking chair, a smashed crucifix, a little statue of Our Lady and a picture of the two seminarians who died in his collapsed house, and together, at the end of our day, we prayed there.
The next morning we ventured into nearby Cite Soleil, perhaps the world’s most notorious slum, where Hands Together have been working for over 12 years and where they had built seven schools in which we provided Mary’s Meals. These schools had become incredible symbols of hope to the impoversished, long suffering people of this place, and in them six thousand children were receiving one good meal every day and gaining a free education.
Our grim and emotional tour revealed that each school had been damaged, some probably beyond repair. Children who usually benefitted from our daily meals were sitting outside in the rubble staring at their destroyed classrooms. Some of the local men with us, hard men who had grown up here amongst the gangs, violence and squalor, and who had devoted much of their lives to the building and running of these schools, wept when they saw how the earthquake had in a few seconds undone years of labour.
As I picked my way through the debris towards St Francis de Sales school’s kitchen, the stench became unbearable and I braced myself for what horror I might find there. I was hugely relieved to find only a rotting pot of beans used to prepare Mary’s Meals. Outside I met Vaneesa and Marie, two Mary’s Meals cooks who explained they ‘had been up to their elbows in beans’ cooking the next day’s meal when the ground began to shake, but that they had managed to crawl to safety.
Later we returned to Fr Tom’s compound where Doug had called a meeting of all the community leaders of Cite Soleil with whom they had been working with for many years. During the course of that first meeting plans formed that began to be put into action that same day. One team began carrying out needs assesments in Cite Soleil to establish who had been killed, who injured, who had lost their house etc.
Others formed teams that began clearing rubble and salvaging reuseable bricks so that, as quickly as possible, we could rebuild the perimeter walls around the school campuses, in order to recreate safe, secure bases from which we could work. None of this work would have been possible without the previous years of work that had established trust between the local community and Hands Together, and that had created networks of people connected to the running of the schools, that could now be mobilised. One of the key elements of this approach was, whenever possible, to give people paid work to support their families and to give them the dignity of rebuilding their own lives.
It soon became clear that Cite Soleil had been affected less dramatically than other parts of the city. Most here were already without adequate food, water, sewage systems and healthcare. Homes made of flimsy tin are less likely to kill you when they collapse. It struck me that all the things that are now urgently needed by millions of people in Haiti were already desperately needed by the people of Cite Soleil even before the quake.
In the days and weeks that followed, donations for the people of Haiti began to flood in to Mary’s Meals from all over the world. In the end nearly £1.3 million pounds was donated – an incredible outpouring of generosity that enabled us both continue the initial emergency work and move on to support longer term rebuilding and recovery efforts.
In addition to the provision of emergency feeding from our bases in Cite Soleil, we were working with our other long term partner, Caritas in Hinche, in Haiti’s central plateau to support the thousands of displaced people who had arrived from Port-au-Prince in desperate need of support. One week after the earthquake we landed a plane full of urgently needed medical supplies for the hospital there that was inundated with the injured and sick.
In Cite Soleil, our focus shifted to building temporary classrooms so that children could return to school whilst longer term repairs on schools were being carried out. Two months after the earthquake these structures were complete and allowed the children to return to the schools where they once again received Mary’s Meals and daily lessons.
Since then, in addition to the normal feeding of the children, we also have provided the the vulnerable elderly of the area with a sit down lunch in the same canteens. One of my happier memories of this year is walking into one of those canteens and watching those men and women standing to sing praise songs in thanksgiving – and to watch Father Tom dancing with one of the ladies with a huge smile on his face.
One year on, we are concluding our emergency work in Haiti, and refocusing on our desire to provide Mary’s Meals to many more impoverished children there.
Already we have moved into new schools, meaning that we are now feeding 15,000 children everyday - up from 12,000 before the earthquake - and we are committed to begin providing meals in other schools on our waiting lists as funds allow.
We believe more than ever that the children who are kept alive and healthy by these meals and who are enabled to gain an education by them, will be the people who grow up to solve Haiti’s multitude of problems. Please God, in time, they will be able to accomplish what a sudden influx of aid agencies has not, and should never have been expected to.
Twelve months on I am able to tell our donors that they money they donated has been used to save many lives, has rebuilt schools, given food and shelter to many and has allowed thousands of the worlds poorest children to continue to receive a daily meal in their place of education.
Of course, though, my friends in Haiti were correct when they realised our response could only be a very small one in comparison to the enormity of suffering, but that does not mean our efforts, and the efforts of so many other good small organisations, were insignificant – certainly not in the lives of those who benefited from donations made.
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