Bringing Hope Around The World Helping Hand Appeal 2018
My Weekly’s Assistant Editor, Sally Rodger, shares her personal memories of 20 years of the Helping Hand Appeal
Imagine a child who has nothing: a child who doesn’t even receive a card at Christmas. That was what we asked you to help rectify back in 1998 when we published a stor y about a charity that was delivering Christmas cards to children in orphanages in Romania.
These children had nothing of their own – even their clothes came from a communal source. A Christmas card would be special, something to treasure, something to let them know that somewhere, someone was thinking about them, caring about them.
You responded so generously, and thousands of Christmas cards with messages of love and hope were handed out.
But we had several letters from readers telling us this wasn’t enough. They saw the mountains of gifts their own grandchildren had been given and it broke their hearts to think of children with nothing. Something had to be done, they told us.
In response, the editor at the time, Harrison Watson, put out a message, asking for ideas of what we could do. We were contacted by Sally Wood-Lamont, a Scottish librarian working in the university medical library in Cluj-Napoca in northern Romania, and Hugh Ferguson who ran a small charity that worked with Safeway to take goods out to Cluj. They suggested that readers could fill shoeboxes with gifts, and they could go in the Safeway lorries out to Romania, where Sally would arrange for them to be distributed to those in need.
It was at this point that Harrison gave me the job (in addition to my job on the editorial team of My Weekly) of co-ordinating the appeal. I
“I found myself in a lorry depot using sign language to speak to a Ukrainian”
remember feeling a mixture of excitement and apprehension – it was a thrill to be involved in something that would make a real difference to children’s lives, but it was a huge responsibility and I hadn’t the first idea how we would go about it!
The next few years turned out to be a steep learning curve – ever ything from customs regulations along the route to failsafe accounting procedures for readers’ donations.
When Safeway closed, I had to find lorries to take our shoeboxes at a cutdown price and that was when I found myself in a lorry depot in Glasgow, using sign language and drawings to communicate with a Ukrainian lorry driver about lorry weights and secure payloads.
Sally Wood-Lamont turned out to be absolutely brilliant – one of those people with boundless energy and relentless determination.
As well as her day job, she organised everything for the arrival of the shoeboxes and their distribution to those in need; she hosted Harrison when he visited to see the shoeboxes being handed out; she liaised with institutions who needed help from the Fund and organised workmen to carry out the jobs.
She sent pictures and updates of the work being carried out. She also opened Romania’s first sports club for disabled people (more news of that in a future issue).
One of my most exciting tasks was to organise a
makeover for Sally when she was awarded an MBE by the Queen in 2002 for services to young people and the disabled in Romania.
As the years went on, the appeal expanded. We worked with Sister of Mercy, Sister Aloysius, in the Children’s hospital wards in Bucharest, with Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow at the organisation’s homes for HIV-positive children, the gypsy settlement of Hill Street in Targu Mures, an old folks’ home at Luna de Jos and a soup kitchen up north in Baia Mare.
However, at the end of 2006, with Romania about to join the EU, we felt that the economic climate in the country was changing, and it was time for us to move on to where we could do the most good.
We began working more closely with Magnus MacFarlane-Barrow who had begun the Mar y’s Meals movement, to feed some of the hungriest children in the world.
The idea was simple; build a kitchen attached to a primary school and have it run by local volunteers. Provide enough of the local staple food (with added vitamins) to feed each child who comes to school every day.
Not only do the children receive the nutrition they need, they are also being educated, empowering them as adults to break the cycle of poverty that their families have been caught in.
Since then, we’ve visited Mary’s Meals projects around the world, including Malawi, Kenya, Haiti, India and Liberia. And we’ve seen, time and time again, how using donations in an effective, targeted way, makes such a huge difference, to health, education and school attendance numbers.
Mary’s Meals is now feeding more than 1.2 million children every day around the world.
I have to admit I have been moved to tears on occasion. The expression of wonder on the face of one particular little boy in the School For The Blind in Cluj got to me – as did a reader who donated her week’s invalidity benefit.
But possibly the most memorable time was the inter view with a doctor in the Paediatric Nutrition ward in Romania who was thanking us for the donation of a feeding pump and telling us what a difference it was making – but then mentioned how hard it was to decide which babies should get to use it.
Needless to say, as soon as we had enough money, we bought another two pumps so that any baby in that clinic who needed help with feeding could have it.
But the smiles have far outweighed the tears. I have never ceased to be amazed and inspired by how generous you are, and whe en I look back at the last 20 years I realise my role in alla this has been a huge privilege. I’ve met amazing g people, heard incredible stories and been immense ely proud to be part of this life-changing and lifeaffirming movement.
“Using donations in a targeted way makes such a difference to health”