June 18

Mary’s Meals
A simple Solution to World Hunger
The Backpack Project
We in the Old Parish are focusing on upcycling to fill backpacks for Mary’s Meals.
This is the Backpack Project.
Now you may think that backpacking is what you do in Nepal and upcycling is a
version of mountain biking, but in fact it’s the new word for ‘jumble’ (as in Jumble
Sale).
We’re checking out all the charity shops for used backpacks, filling them with
clothes for children between the ages of 4 - 12 years, adding soap and toothbrush,
towel and a spoon, pencils and crayons and a notebook - and a ball - and in the
process, having a lot of fun. One backpack per child, and often the first ‘gift’ this
child will ever have received. And when a backpack is filled, it joins hundreds of
others in Glasgow and is then shipped off in a container to Malawi.
I’m upcycling
with my
backpack!
The story of Mary’s Meals
At a recent Breakfast Church we heard about the charity begun from a shed in
Glasgow, by the inspirational Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow. In 2002 he visited
Malawi during a famine and met a mother dying from AIDS. When he asked her
eldest son Edward what his dreams were in life, Edward replied simply:
“…I want to have enough food to eat and to go to school one day”
That moment was key to the founding of Mary’s Meals, which reaches out to
children who, instead of sitting in a classroom, are working in fields, begging on
street corners, or scavenging among the garbage just to survive.
From modest beginnings this charity has grown until it is now feeding 1.2 million
children world-wide every day. Mary’s Meals provides daily meals in school for