In touch community report 2006

Spring 2007

In Barretstown

Our relationship with Barretstown is at the centre of our community work. We get as much out of this partnership as they do.

Barretstown provides a programme of therapeutic recreation for children with cancer and other serious illnesses.

Barretstown castle is at Ballymore Eustace, Co Kildare in Ireland.

Through their achievements they stop seeing themselves as ‘sick kids’ and begin to regain their own inner strength, confidence and self-esteem.

The programme is backed by leading medical specialists as a valuable part in a child’s recovery from serious illnesses.

The parents do not pay anything. Funding comes from individuals and from institutions.

Barretstown has served over 11,000 children from 22 dierent European countries since it opened in 1994.

Trying something new

Last November all the lawyers in the property, planning and environmental teams went to Barretstown for a charity and training weekend. Our aim was to focus on team building, help out with a maintenance job that needed doing and conduct our annual training day in a new environment.

Before we went, the secretaries on our team held a Barretstown cake sale and bought a karaoke machine, two guitars and 12 painting packs. The weekend began with a reception in the drawing room. After a lemonade or two, a few of us entertained the troops with a medley of Britney Spears’ greatest hits.

The next morning we rose early to tackle our task: to paint three children’s cottages with bright, colourful designs. Although the prospect of drawing outlines and colouring in was of course a busman’s holiday for a batch of property lawyers, some of us were unaccountably nervous. Our teamworking tradition came to the fore just in time and we set the artistic members of the team the task of stencilling, while the rest of us waited to start the tricky and painstaking work of colouring in.

Our reward was good food and a chance to dance the night away. The next day was given over to training; and where better to develop our practice than in a castle? The weekend was a huge success, and Barretstown stayed with me for a long time afterwards. I’ve been wondering why that was, and I’ve reached the conclusion that it’s because lawyers live in an insular world. We spend all our time with other lawyers, discussing the law or meeting with clients. This was a bit more radical than we were used to. It’s a humbling experience when you do something out of your work sphere.

Wasim Khan
Norton Rose

Our involvement is physical, almost visceral; that doesn’t happen often with lawyers
Parrick Farrell
Norton Rose

For the bereaved

The session that I participated in was a bereavement camp for families who had lost a child to a serious illness. I was curious to see how therapeutic recreation – the core principle behind Barretstown’s work – could be combined with the incredible hurt and grief which come from the loss of a child. The result was one of the most powerful, moving and magical weekends I have ever spent. In the evening, the adults and older children gathered for a quiet time called “Reflection”... Poems were read, music was played, and all of us – even the caras – were encouraged to grieve for our individual losses...

A Memorial Service was held on the last evening of camp. We gathered in the Reflection circle, and then we walked to the lake, down a path lit by lights. Each of us was given a silver balloon. Some words were spoken, and a song was played. We were told to release our balloons whenever we were ready, and, somehow, letting go of that balloon became another kind of letting go altogether.

Elizabeth Ranagan
Norton Rose

After the rain the sun

After a morning of induction, in true Irish fashion the mist (aka heavy downpour of rain) came down over Barretstown.

Another girl and I were assigned as caras to a family from Dublin. The kids ranged in age from 2 to 6 and were great crack to work with. The 4-year-old Sean had a brain tumour and was visually impaired as a result but his sisters didn’t let him get away with anything. It was a real breath of fresh air to work with these kids and really makes you pause for thought when you think you’ve had a bad day at the office.

 

Friday night was a mixture of story telling and skits and everyone was left wondering where Merlin’s magic wand had disappeared to.

Saturday dawned early. The sun came out after breakfast, and, once the parents had headed o, we split up into groups and, depending on their ages, the kids did everything from ziplining to fishing, pottery, horse riding and archery.

Saturday night was a special night where the parents got a chance to spend some time alone and entrusted their kids to us as we dressed up in daft costumes and naively volunteered for audience participation activities – which inevitably ended in us being covered in yoghurt,water or shaving foam. Naturally the kids thoroughly enjoyed this ritual humiliation of the adults.

Grainne McCarthy
Norton Rose

Our involvement We help them contact other countries, we advise them on property issues, and we arrange legal advice. We work as volunteers and we raise funds for them. This is not a one-o annual fund-raising activity. It’s not a relationship conducted at a distance. We are in it for the long term. The opportunities for involvement are tremendous. We have already held a training and development day there for our property and environment lawyers, and now the whole of our finance department wants to go out there. We have an ongoing project to create a sensory garden on the site. Barretstown is about “serious fun”. It’s not quantifiable, but we think that our contact with them will, over time, help our people to think more creatively. Fresh perspectives tend to produce fresh thinking. www.barretstown.org