Magnus Quit His Job, Sold His House, And Learned How To Drive Announced Lorries.

Magnus Macfarlane-Barrow's first experience of delivering help was to drive a Land Rover crammed with food, clothing and medication from the Highlands of Scotland down to Bosnia. At the time he was a salmon farmer : he had taken merely a week's vacation to do it. When he got back, his folks shed was bulging with help that had poured in from mates and buddies of buddies. He give up his job, sold his place, and learned to drive related lorries. Now, about 20 years on, his charity Mary's Meals feeds 500k youngsters every day.

But that isn't the beginning of the tale. At least, not how Magnus tells it. The genuine beginning was ten years before when he was fourteen, and he went on a pilgrimage to a small town called Medugorje.

I meet Magnus for tea near London Victoria. He's tall and in a suit ; his hair is greying a bit at the sides. He says he finds it hard to describe the effect that first trip had on him. "It was something in my heart an experience of Our Lord God's grace," he says. Later on he describes it as "something God appears to do for many of us there : [he] gives them an awareness of his liking for them".

It is a madcap journey : ten of his family and friends, all youths, turned up at Medjugorje without anywhere to remain. They'd read an article about six youngsters having visions of the Virgin Mary and thought if it was probably true they should visit. They flew in to Dubrovnik and drove there in 2 hire cars (harder than it sounds, since their map didn't have Medjugorje on it).

After evening Mass a friar, Fr Slavko Barbaric, came over to them and introduced them to his sister, who they ended up staying with for the week and who had youngsters their age. It was, Magnus says, an "amazing mix of the supernatural and the very mundane" one minute they'd be speaking to Bosnian youngsters about Italian soccer and the subsequent "we'd all be talking about the incontrovertible fact that one of them was going out with one of the visionaries".

At the time the 6 claimed visionaries were young kids, too. They invited Magnus's group into the room where they were having apparitions of the Virgin Mary every evening. Magnus knows 2 of them still.

What struck him, though, was not the visionaries themselves they were "very nice, terribly normal people" but the faith of the villagers and the way they responded to what the 6 youngsters were pronouncing.

"By the time I came home," he says, "I had the idea that Our Woman really was appearing in Medjugorje and she was appearing with a message for the entire world."

He asserts that he needed to try, "in whatever way I could, to reply to her invitation to put God back at the centre".

About 10 years later Magnus was in a bar with his bro Fergus. They were talking about a news item they'd seen about refugees near Medjugorje in the Bosnian war. And that's when they thought of driving aid there themselves.

Magnus has a tendency to play down his role in all this. Once the donations came pouring in, he says, "it was harder to stop than it had been to start". Giving up his house and job was no big sacrifice, he insists . He had been a salmon farmer for six years and was "looking to do something else anyway".

After 20 minutes or so of talking Magnus, though very mild-mannered, talks at a phenomenal pace we remember to pour the tea. Over the following ten years, he explains, his charity Scottish Global Relief brought help to Bosnia, built care homes in Romania and worked in Liberia and some place else.

His stories pour out and are examples of the most moving I have ever heard. He talks about 11-year-old Romanian orphans so neglected they could not walk correctly. The youngsters, all HIV positive, had been deserted in surgeries and nobody had lifted them out of their cots long enough for them to learn. The doctors, he says, "couldn't see any worth in those youngsters at all and they were dying, numbers of them, every week".

Magnus recalls an exchange with one doctor who said : "I have no idea why you're building these [care] houses for these kids." Pointing to one girl, Juliana, he announced : "She'll be dead before you even finish building them." Now, Magnus says, "Juliana's a young girl, and a few summers gone I went back for the weddings of 3 of those girls. It has been a miracle to me as we thought we were building an infirmary where they may have a sober death so truly it's been an amazing thing that each one of them are still alive."

Magnus has masses of these stories, and is used to informing them, I think. He gives talks in colleges and to fundraising groups. He says at 1 time : "I'm sure there's only a certain amount of all this stuff you want, because there's a large amount of it." as reported tagza.com.