Thursday 20 December 2012

Mary's Meals Deliver Food and Hope



Hello dear friend,
Thank you so much for stopping by! I hope that you are well and staying safe from Covid! Please find below an article on Mary's Meals that I wrote some years ago. The great news is that until 30th January 22 your donations - up to £1.6 million - will be matched by generous donators. So it's a great time to help feed hungry children around the world as they get an education. God bless. 

At Christmas, traditionally a time for giving, many people like to donate to a charitable cause, so I thought you may be interested in #Mary’s Meals – a brilliant organisation based in Scotland and operating worldwide, that, though new to me (and maybe to you too), began operating two decades ago, and now, as part of their workload, feeds over 600,000 impoverished children school meals daily.

When a volunteer visited our church recently the details about Mary’s Meals that grabbed my attention were:

* An impressive 93p of each £1 donated goes to charitable activities (1p is spent on governance and 6p goes on fund raising)

* Learning that £7 - £10.70 will feed one child daily for a whole school year means you know roughly how many kids you are helping with your donation.  

Beginnings of Mary’s Meals
During 1992 two brothers, Magnus and +Fergus MacFarlane-Barrow from Scotland, watched the TV news from the Bosnian conflict with increasing horror. They were so moved that they decided to organise an appeal for food and blankets.

They quickly gathered a jeep load, joined one of the convoys leaving the UK, and delivered the aid to Medjugorje in Bosnia and Herzegovina, a place of international pilgrimage which they had visited with their family years previously. Believing their good deed done, they returned to their home in Argyll expecting to resume their jobs as fish farmers. However they came home to discover that public donations had continued to flood in, filling their parents’ shed with goods. (They are still operating out of this shed to keep costs low.)

Magnus decided to give up his job for a year to drive the aid out to Bosnia for as long as the public kept donating. The public did not stop and it soon became necessary to set up a registered charity, Scottish International Relief (SIR). The charity soon expanded and began to work in Romania, building homes for abandoned children, and in Liberia, helping returning refugees by setting up mobile clinics, while continuing to deliver material aid to Croatia and Bosnia, and funding additional projects.

In 2002, SIR was operating a simple famine relief project in Malawi when Magnus met a family that led to a whole new area of work. The mother was dying of AIDS and lying on the floor of her hut surrounded by her six young children. She said that all that was left for her was to pray for her children, that someone might look after them after she had died.

When Magnus asked the mother’s oldest son what he hoped for in life, his stark reply, “To have enough food to eat and to go to school one day,” was not easily forgotten.
This was a key part of the inspiration that led to the Mary’s Meals campaign, which aims to provide chronically hungry children with one meal every school day. In this way the children are encouraged to gain the education that can lift them out of poverty in later life.

This simple but effective idea has gathered momentum and today provides meals to impoverished children in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, Eastern Europe and South America.
In 2012, Scottish International Relief officially changed its registered charity name to Mary’s Meals. Today they provide daily life-changing meals to over 600,000 hungry children.

Facts at a glance
*   Total number of children receiving a daily meal in school = 702,465
*   Average global cost of Mary’s Meals per child, per year = £10.70 / €12.40 / $16.80
*   Cost of Mary’s Meals per child, per year in Malawi = £7 / €8.15 / $11
*   Worldwide average cost per meal = 6 pence / 7 cents (Euros) and 9 cents (US)
*   Cost per meal in Malawi = 4 pence / 5 cents (Euros) and 6 cents (US)
*   Number of chronically hungry children in the world = 300 million. Around 67 million of these children are out of school.

For more info and to donate please visit the website of Mary’s Meals: http://marysmeals.org.uk

Wishing you a happy and holy Christmas and wonderful 2013!
Love and light
Teresa x

(Photo above copied from Wikipedia)

I welcome your comments on the above and please feel free to post links to your favourite charities too.

Coming next: New Year Fresh Start – embrace personal growth

UPDATES!!!

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God bless,

Teresa 

PS. About the links to Singapore, please see my blog post Singapore and Christianity  



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