Helping Hand Appeal 2019
Area manager Daniel completed his education thanks to the charity. Now he works for them, helping thousands more pupils
Civil war, poverty, high maternal mortality – Liberia has known all these horrors, and many more. And when they play out in individual lives like that of Daniel Maison, they change everything.
Daniel (32) is an area manager for Mary’s Meals in the west African nation, one of the poorest countries on earth.
We’re travelling together through Bomi County, north west of the capital Monrovia, during the rainy season: our 4x4, expertly driven by Thomas, struggles through water-filled troughs on the unmade roads, and several times we are temporarily stuck in the churning mud.
This is the reality, the sort of obstacles Mary’s Meals is up against.
Daniel is an articulate, smart man, and I’m unprepared for the raw pain of his story as we chat in the back of the vehicle. He was born in a rural village, the eldest of six boys.
“My parents are farmers,” he tells me. “Our village was on a hill, beside a river. As a boy I enjoyed fishing and playing in the woods. We were poor, but we had enough.”
Then when he was ten the civil war flared up, and everything changed.
“Our village was in an area of fighting, and we had to get out. We went to Monrovia and lived in a displacement camp there. It was tough.”
Torn from their home and livelihood, money and food were in short supply – so Mary’s Meals, which Daniel received at his secondary school, St Dominic’s High School in Tubmanburg, made the difference between dropping out of school and staying in education.
“I knew how crucial it was to continue my studies,” he says. “But if it hadn’t been for Mary’s Meals it would have been impossible – I’d have had to find food or the money to buy food somewhere else.
“To get that support was amazing. I remember carrying my bowl to school every day, and I remember how much it meant to have a tummy full of food.”
Today, Daniel tells his story to the children in the schools where he works.
“I say, ‘Mary’s Meals made me who I am.
Without them, I wouldn’t have finished my education.’”
But Daniel’s difficulties didn’t end when he left school. When I ask him about his family, a shadow crosses his face.
“I’ve got two kids, a daughter aged six and another aged eight months. But my wife Zoe died giving birth, so right now my children live with other people – my older daughter is being looked after by my sister, while the baby is cared for by my friend’s wife.”
He shows me a picture on his phone of his two lovely little girls.
It’s shocking to realise that they’re growing up without a mother because of a tragedy that would have been entirely preventable in the developed world.
Liberia has one of the highest rates of maternal mortality in the world, not helped by a healthcare system that’s been severely affected by the long years of civil war. One in every ten women dies while pregnant, giving birth, or after delivering a baby.
On plenty of other fronts too, the statistics are shocking. Six in ten primary school age children in Liberia aren’t in school – that’s the second highest proportion in any country on the planet.
However, Mary’s Meals does make a big difference. When pupils receive meals – they have a porridge-style meal two days a week, and rice and beans the other three – enrolment goes up.
The meals are cooked by volunteers from the local community. Most of those I met on my recent trip were mothers or grandmothers with children in the school.
The food is delivered to schools a month’s supply at a time, and representatives of the Parent Teacher Association are responsible for keeping it safe in a locked storeroom, safe from rats.
Daniel’s job involves running the warehouse and ensuring food reaches the 119 schools on his patch, serving a total of 80,000 youngsters.
The road conditions and the challenges of the rainy season don’t make that an easy job.
Daniel is well aware of how important it is to keep on going despite the difficulties.
Before his wife’s death, his daughter was at a school that received Mary’s Meals; in the future, he hopes she will be again, and her sister too. For him, every day is about the children’s future – his own daughters’ and that of the thousands of other kids he helps thanks to Mary’s Meals.