All around was conspicuous consumption. You’d think Glaswegians had never heard of the recession. Lunch was in full swing and no one was holding back, except as SHEILA HAMILTON quickly found out, Evening Times International Scotswoman of the Year 2008 Mary Miller.

The habits of the past year, her work in Zimbabwe and with the Jeely Piece Club in Castlemilk, are hard to break. As we prepare to announce this year’s winners on Thursday, we chat to Mary about the challenges of the past year...

Mary and her husband, the Very Rev Dr John Miller, retired minister of Castlemilk East Church and former Moderator of the Church of Scotland, spent much of 2009 in Zimbabwe.

Family and friends back home were seriously worried about what the couple had let themselves in for.

Wondering not just whether they had enough to eat in a country where thousands were starving or dying of cholera, but also about their safety in an increasingly violent and volatile situation under the rule of Robert Mugabe.

When Mary returned to Glasgow to attend the Evening Times awards ceremony a year ago, it was pretty obvious to anyone who knew her that she had lost quite a bit of weight.

Crops had failed and even for those with US dollars, there was hardly any food to be had.

“But we were never what I would call malnourished,” insists Mary. “We weren’t hungry in local terms at all.”

Mary described one distressing and “extreme but not completely isolated incident”.

“A young minister told me about a family in his parish. The parents had died and a girl of 12 looked after brothers of eight and five. When someone went to visit the children, they found they had all died of starvation.

“On the whole, people are not dying of hunger now, but they are malnourished and vulnerable.

“Things weren’t so bad last year thanks to better rains and economic reforms by the unity government, but at least 1.9 million people are still expected to need aid this year.” As for their personal safety, Mary claims she was never really afraid.

“In Zimbabwe, there was a sense of underlying menace and there were a few heart-stopping moments, but it was tension rather than terror.”

She recalls one night when John was very late returning from the capital, Harare.

“I really did get worked up as I knew he had to go through the dreadful road blocks. You were unsure what they were going to do.”

Mary always seems very calm and collected, but she admits to feeling emotional when she thinks of Zimbabwe.

“I’m a terrible person for crying, but I had to take a decision early on in Zimbabwe. Either, I became an emotional wreck or I just got on with it.

“It’s so obvious that you can’t do everything that you just think, ‘I’ll just get on with the bits I can do’.

“I would say you had to detach yourself a bit and learn the Zimbabwean way of coping. People say, ‘It’s in God’s hands – what can we do?’.”

Mary makes light of their modest diet. “We knew we would get something and certainly we were in the minority in knowing that.

“We took over a big bag of porridge oats and a big bag of tea bags from home and we would have porridge and tea for breakfast.

“If you could get bread, we had a piece of bread for lunch, tomato and peanut butter which of course, was a staple and very nutritious.

“And then in the evening, we would have vegetables and rice or whatever. To be honest, we were eating half the amount we eat here, but we were fine really.

“But when you were making plans for training, you had to take into account that you might be working with people whose main pre-occupation was where their next meal was coming from.”

Mary remembers how thrilled she was to receive the Scotswoman of the Year award last January. “It meant a lot to me and I suppose it was a validation to me in what I was doing.

“It also meant that the congregation of St Columba’s Presbyterian church in Mutare, where John was the locum minister and where many people have Scots connections, looked at me with a new respect, if some surprise.”

Mary has helped establish a resource centre at Murambinda Hospital for children and adolescents with HIV and Aids.

“It trains staff and volunteers in how to provide information and support. Someone has to tell them they are HIV positive. It should be the family, but that is a huge problem for them because if it’s the mother, she has to tell them they got it from her and she has to answer the question of how she got it and what she did.

“And even if it wasn’t for all that, how can you tell your child that they’ve got a potentially fatal illness and cope with their distress as well as your own?”

Some children, Mary says, had been on antiretroviral drugs for years without knowing why they were taking them. Mary says self-deprecatingly that she wasn’t much use as a counsellor because she couldn’t speak the language well enough.

“For counselling, you have to be really fluent to pick up all the things that people aren’t saying,” she said.

Where she comes into her own is training people and linking up Zimbabwe with resources in the West.

“I linked up with an organisation in Harare which ran support groups for adolescent people to produce books about their experiences of finding out they were HIV positive and how to cope with quite complicated drug regimes.”

Caring for the HIV orphans, Mary points out, is a huge challenge for society. A recent survey revealed that 44 per cent of the children attending the resource centre had lost both parents and another 25 per cent had lost one parent.

She and John shuttled between the hospital in Harare – where Mary was also working with AfricAid –and Mutare, where John was working, before returning to Glasgow in the summer.

Mary was about to accept a year’s contract with AfricAid when her elder daughter, Sarah, announced she was having her first baby in March. It’s the second grandchild, but Mary couldn’t bear to be away so long. She is now working from Glasgow on preparing materials for a mental health programme in four rural secondary schools in Zimbabwe, and planning a training film for staff and caregivers of pre-five children with HIV for the Elizabeth Glaser Paediatric AIDS Foundation.

For the future, she hopes she and John can return to Zimbabwe for a couple of months twice a year. “There is huge potential for all kinds of developments,” Mary said.

Real retirement is obviously far off for both.