The Shed That Fed a Million Children: The Mary’s Meals Story

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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 (#u7f0fd686-32b1-581d-b684-60892ef9031c)

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 (#u7f0fd686-32b1-581d-b684-60892ef9031c)

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 (#u7f0fd686-32b1-581d-b684-60892ef9031c)

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.