Christmas Message from Magnus Macfarlane-Barrow, CEO & Founder

Magnus has a special Christmas message for our Mary's Meals family, as we come to the close of a very challenging year.

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow
Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow
Mary's Meals founder and CEO

Back to all stories | Posted on 9 December 20 in NewsUpdate from Magnus

Dear friend,

As we come to the end of a year that has been unlike any other, I want to thank you for your faithful support of Mary’s Meals. So much has been turned upside down, so many plans have been halted and so many new challenges have appeared in all our lives. Even our Christmas celebrations might need to be different this year, with many of us suffering the pain of not being with people we love. I imagine that at many of our Christmas tables there will be a space where someone should have been. 

But amid all this, not only have we managed to keep our promise of a daily meal to more than 1.6 million of the world’s poorest children while they learn, we have begun feeding in new schools too. And we thank God for this because in this time of new hardship and change, there’s a risk that the world’s most vulnerable and marginalized children are forgotten. The children we feed in the prisons of Madagascar, the HIV positive children on the streets of Zimbabwe and the little ones suffering in war-ravaged South Sudan – they are so often without a voice. And certainly, many of them will have no invitation to anyone’s Christmas table this year. More than ever, we want to give them a voice and to ensure that, at the very least, they might have a good meal every day – a meal that can make their education and a better future possible.

Over the past few years, through the ‘virtual Christmas table’ on our website, we have invited supporters to ‘set a place’ by making a donation to feed a child for a year – and many kind, generous people have done just that. This invitation feels even more poignant this year when all of us, to an extent, are having to live a more virtual life.

Maybe as we think about new ways to connect and celebrate this year, we might think of those children and their hunger and invite them, virtually, to share our table and our food. To do so of course is not only a virtual act. It will result in another child being promised a meal each day (not a virtual one, but a very real, hot, tasty one cooked and served with love by a local volunteer). And through that practical act of kindness, the child will know they are loved – that they are not forgotten.

On behalf of all those children I thank you with all my heart. Please stay safe and have a very Blessed and Happy Christmas.

God bless,

Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow
Founder of Mary’s Meals