Patricia in Zambia. Patricia Friel always had a want to help people. From her home town of Ramelton to where she lives now in Cavan, she has ended up having a positive impact in those close to home and in faraway lands.
Now the executive director of Mary’s Meals in Ireland, she works full time at ensuring young people get access to food at school in some of the places most in need.
She got involved in 2013 when her friend Fr Eamonn Kelly, who is now the Chair of Mary’s Meals Ireland Board, asked her to do the fundraising walk to knock.
“He rang me up, I though t he was looking for somewhere to stay, so my mind was saying yes already. He was actually asking me to walk to knock and I wouldn’t walk the length of myself,” she tells The Irish Catholic.
It took her five days to walk to Knock with the group. “I got nine blisters. It was the most beautiful summer, I was covered in sun cream yet I was getting burned by the wind,” says Patricia. They walked for about 25 kilometres each day until they reached their destination.
The walk to Knock still happens annually with starting points across Ireland in Limerick, Kilkenny, Coal Island and Malin. Since 2013 Patricia has also done the walk from Malin which is nine days long – taking five days just to walk out of Donegal. The efforts she says, raises around 100,000 for the charity.
Patricia says the main reasons she was so taken with the charity was a video, Child 31, that Fr Eamonn showed her made by Mary’s Meals. “Even to this day that little movie caught my heart, I’d say it cracked my heart a bit to see what those little children go through but yet then to see the joy that Mary’s Meals brought when they started feeding in their local communities.”
“Although I wasn’t fit to do the walk, my feet weren’t fit, my body wasn’t fit; I had a new sense of purpose for this one little boy that in the video.” She tells of a little boy who sleeps on a fertiliser bag and who has to sew his schoolbag closed every day.
This is not the first time Patricia has volunteered for anything. “I always did a bit of volunteer work, my mum had Alzheimer’s and after my mum died, we did a bit of fundraising for the Alzheimer’s society because they were just so wonderful.” She ended up going skydiving as a fundraiser for them.
Back in her younger years Patricia said she had thought she wanted to be a farmer and went to agricultural college. “I did marry a farmer so that was a full turn around,” she says, but decided against pursuing it.
Most recently she worked with Junior Development Ireland. “I loved my job, 12 and a half years in and I was going nowhere,” she says.
She first joined the board of Mary’s Meals in 2018 while still working then the director position opened up.
“When the opportunity came, I just said with faith, if this is the way my life is meant to go, I have a great love for Mary’s Meals and I just applied for the job.” She ended up getting it, and while she said she felt there were people more qualified than her, the fact that she was chosen felt like a sign that this was where she was meant to be.
Just before she started in the position in January, she went over to Zambia with a group of 7 from the charity, paying her own way to go and see what kind of impact their work had been having.
“It was a wonderful experience we got to visit six schools that Mary’s feed in and we got to meet the most beautiful teachers who care so much about their children and then the very shy children, very excited.
“The one thing that I thought is, children are the same the world over,” she says.
“Whether they’ve got houses full of stuff or they’re sitting on plane floor with nothing they still have that wide-eyed excitement. The one thing I thought was those children, those people I met, they had so much joy,” she says she got a lot from seeing how happy everyone was with nothing, not even a schoolbag to their name.
Mothers and other volunteers cook the food provided by Mary’s Meals, this is so they can take ownership and really feel like they are helping their community according to Patricia.
She says what struck a chord for her the most were the mothers who came with their children or came to cook, “there were mothers who came to meet us and the just came to thank us for feeding their children and that really stayed with me. They were thanking me they were also saying not to stop, please don’t stop feeding our children.”
Patricia although not a mother herself says she can imagine the stress of not being able to feed your children.
“I suppose I always had a want to help people. I’ve been left with a lovely life, if you can do something to help someone else why not?”