‘What would you do,’ they asked, ‘if you came across evidence that a product sold by a company, who had a very substantial advertising account with this magazine – say a chemical used for getting rid of parasites on salmon – was having a hugely detrimental effect on wild shellfish in the area?’
‘Of course I would write a factually correct, well-researched article, exposing this. It would be an important story to tell,’ I said with some relish, not for one second thinking that, to them, my answer was hopelessly naive. But then I noticed them looking at each other, one with raised eyebrow, the other smirking. Too late, I realized that my fantasies of writing award-winning journalism as a weapon of truth and justice were not necessarily compatible with writing for a Scottish fish-farming magazine. Julie was waiting for me outside and when I told her what had happened we laughed so much, realizing that our hearts had never really been in it. In fact our hearts were not really in anything outside of the work we were already doing. And in Julie I had a fiancée who not once, ever, expressed any concern about our future financial security or well-being.
However, we were running out of money. It was a year since I had given up my job. We needed to make some choices. The board of trustees proposed that I start to take a small salary so that this work, which was growing steadily, could continue. Eventually, after much discussion, thought and prayer, I accepted. It was a very difficult decision. This had not been part of the original plan, and to take even a small portion of the money given us in order to support myself made me feel very uncomfortable. We wanted our organization, and still do to this day, to be as low-cost and as reliant on volunteers as possible. But the alternative was for me to go back to another job and for us to wind down the organization, just at a time when more and more people were supporting us and encouraging us to go on. And one small salary represented a very small percentage of the value of donations. So I accepted the offer and I am very glad I did.
We continued, relentlessly, to look for the most effective ways to deliver the aid that people kept entrusting us with. I was happy that our new bigger lorry had reduced the costs of transport significantly, but now I became bothered that we were driving back across Europe on each return trip with a huge empty trailer. I began asking people if there was anything someone would pay us to carry back from Eastern Europe to help offset costs. Around this time I came to know Sir Tom Farmer, perhaps Scotland’s best-known entrepreneur and founder of Kwik Fit, the enormous car tyre and exhaust-fitting company. He had, years previously, visited Mum and Dad at our retreat centre in Dalmally and been very kind in supporting them. It turned out that at this time he was importing lots of tyres to Scotland from Slovenia and northern Italy. He was happy for us to carry some of these as ‘return loads’ back to his Kwik Fit depots and to pay us the going rate. Sir Tom became a great friend and mentor over the next few years, giving me his time whenever I asked, and some hugely important words of wisdom.
‘Target your values, don’t value your targets,’ he told me when I mentioned growth figures or ambitious plans. On other occasions, when I talked of new ideas, he would refocus me by saying, ‘Magnus, just stick to the knitting!’
The return loads worked wonderfully well and, in time, through agents, we also began to arrange other cargo (refrigerators, flat-pack furniture, etc.) that we could carry back. To do this we had to obtain an Operator’s Licence to run a haulage company, which necessitated me doing some study on international haulage and passing an exam. The return loads worked really well in offsetting much of the cost of transport, but before long I realized that I was now spending most of my time running a trucking company. I felt that was not what I should be doing with my time. So I began to think about it the other way round. I observed on our journeys that there were lots of Eastern European trucks delivering goods to the UK. They must also have empty trailers to fill on their return journeys? And so that is what we began to do. Now that we had established, trusted partners, like the Family Centre in Zagreb, we could load a Croatian truck in Scotland and pay them a very reasonable cost to transport it for us. This became our preferred way of working, allowing us to concentrate on raising awareness of our work, collecting aid and thanking our donors. It also enabled us to cope with the ever-increasing scale. By the peak of our aid deliveries, during the Kosovo crisis in 1999, we were loading a 40-tonne truck almost every day for two consecutive months, from four Glasgow warehouses. We asked a radio station in Glasgow to make an appeal for more volunteers, and over just one weekend 500 people registered at our warehouses to help pack and sort the goods. These trucks took the aid by road to Split where, with the help of the redoubtable Dr Marijo, our trusted friend in Croatia, it was transferred to ships for the final leg of the journey into Albania, where huge numbers of refugees from Kosovo were arriving.
Also, the kind of aid we sent evolved as we went on. As stability returned to certain areas of Bosnia-Herzegovina and Croatia, some refugees began returning to homes that had been damaged and looted. An urgent need grew for the things they required to start life again. Now our trucks began to carry cutlery, kitchen utensils and tools.
One group of people who were grappling with the possibility of a return home were good friends of ours. They were Bosnian Muslim refugees living in Glasgow. They had fled their hometown, Bosanski Petrovac, which lay in a Serb-controlled part of Bosnia-Herzegovina, in 1992, and eventually arrived by chance in Glasgow, having been evacuated by the UN. It was there, when they began coming to our warehouse to volunteer their time to help prepare the aid donations for shipment to their homeland, that we got to know them. They became part of the ‘team’ of warehouse volunteers and told us that being able to do this gave their broken lives a purpose. Not only were they struggling to learn English and adapt to a foreign culture; they were also finding life on the seventeenth floor of a block of flats in the city very different from their former rural existence. There were twelve of them, all closely related, and sometimes we invited them up to visit us in Dalmally where they would enjoy barbecues with us. Suad, and his wife Zlata, who had a young son, were about our age and we became friends. As their English improved, they wanted to tell us more about what had happened to them. They explained that before the war their village had been home to Serbs and Muslims who had lived peacefully together. Many of their neighbours were Serbian whom they had known all their lives.
‘We were just working in the fields like normal,’ Suad explained. ‘Shooting just started. There was tension in the village. We all knew what was happening in other parts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. But even one week before we had been invited to a party at the house of our Serb neighbours. The shots were coming from near that neighbour’s house, beside our field. My father and my brother Mersad fell. They were bleeding. I was hit too.’ He pointed to the scars on his withered arm.
‘My brother Mersad took a long time to die. He kept shouting “Suad, help me,” but I couldn’t. I was all bloody too.’
‘We were watching it all happen from our house,’ Zlata said quietly. ‘We wanted to run out to them in the field but the Serb was shooting from some bushes nearby. He would have killed us. Edin, Mersad’s son, was ten. He kept on trying to run out to his dad and we had to hold him back. Eventually when it became dark Suad managed to crawl home.’
The next day they squeezed on to overcrowded buses provided by the UN to evacuate them to Zagreb. They were shot at by Serbs and endured an appalling journey in the heat, without food or water.