{"id":2903,"date":"2007-02-17T19:34:09","date_gmt":"2007-02-17T19:34:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/marys-meals.html"},"modified":"2007-02-17T19:34:09","modified_gmt":"2007-02-17T19:34:09","slug":"marys-meals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/marys-meals.html","title":{"rendered":"Mary’s Meals"},"content":{"rendered":"

The new edition of the British Catholic paper the Catholic Herald, features Scottish International Relief, ministering to the poorest of the poor:<\/a><\/p>\n

\n
\n

For Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, the poverty in Haiti is the worst he has ever seen. The founder and director of the charity Scottish International Relief (SIR) speaks from a wealth of experience as his organisation, one of Scotland\u2019s most respected homegrown charities, has on-going humanitarian projects in places such as Kenya, Liberia and India.<\/p>\n

MacFarlane-Barrow, a 38-year-old devout Catholic, travels widely to oversee its work. He recently set up Mary\u2019s Meals in Haiti and is working with an American charity called Hands Together, which runs seven schools in Cit\u00e9 Soleil.<\/p>\n

MacFarlane-Barrow says the horror of Haiti is unsurpassed. \u201cI was deeply shocked by what I saw. I thought I had seen quite a lot over the years in terms of suffering but this was the most extreme I had ever witnessed. Even in war zones like Bosnia or Liberia, or after disasters like the tsunami, I have not seen people so utterly stripped of their dignity.\u201d Since its inception 14 years ago, SIR has become a highly effective overseas aid organisation and MacFarlane-Barrow runs the global operation from a tiny shed in the grounds of Craig Lodge near the small village of Dalmally in Argyll, juggling his workload with being a dad to five young children. \u201cI am away perhaps eight to 10 weeks during the year. I don\u2019t want to be away from my wife Julie and children any longer than that,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

SIR began by accident in 1992 after MacFarlane-Barrow watched graphic television reports of refugee camps during the Bosnian war. It struck a chord with him and his older brother Fergus as they had previously made a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, so they began raising money to drive a Land Rover to the region filled with clothes, food and medicine. When they returned from Bosnia, thinking their good deed was done, they found the donations kept coming. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

The group’s website – very, very impressive<\/a>.<\/p>\n

<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The new edition of the British Catholic paper the Catholic Herald, features Scottish International Relief, ministering to the poorest of the poor: For Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, the poverty in Haiti is the worst he has ever seen. The founder and director of the charity Scottish International Relief (SIR) speaks from a wealth of experience as his…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nMary's Meals - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/02\/marys-meals.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Mary's Meals - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The new edition of the British Catholic paper the Catholic Herald, features Scottish International Relief, ministering to the poorest of the poor: For Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow, the poverty in Haiti is the worst he has ever seen. 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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2903\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}