Young as they are, the 40 children camping at St Albert's College, UNE, this weekend have all known tragedy. Each has lost a parent, sibling, or legal guardian.
Subscribe now for unlimited access.
$0/
(min cost $0)
or signup to continue reading
The three-day camp, run by Sydney-based grief education and support program Feel the Magic, provides a safe place for grieving kids to grow and thrive, founder James Thomas said.
He and his wife Kristy started the service seven years ago. Both had lost loved ones at an early age: Mr Thomas both parents, his wife her brother.
The camp is designed to help similar kids navigate their way through life, develop resilience, and achieve their full potential while dealing with big emotions.
"It's a fun weekend filled with grief education," Mr Thomas said.
READ ALSO:
There are sports, games of tug-of-war, and other team activities for the kids to make friends and test themselves. The education and support ("the therapeutic side of things," Mr Thomas said) comes in five talk-time sessions, which introduce the metaphor of grief as the seasons of the year.
Autumn, Mr Thomas explained, with its dying trees and falling leaves, represents the shock of losing someone. Winter is the stage of grief where one feels angry or frustrated; cold, miserable, and reluctant to get out of bed. Spring represents the hope that new beginnings are around the corner, and it's OK to feel happy without being guilty that the loved one isn't there. Summer sunshine (as the Beatles knew) sees smiles returning to faces, happiness, and the feeling of coming out the other side.
"No matter what stage of the year they're at, they can refer to those tools they've learned in those season sessions," Mr Thomas said.
The children and youths, seven to 17 years old, come from within a three-hour radius of St Albert's College, some as far as Brisbane and the Gold Coast. Every child is matched with an adult mentor who will be by their side throughout the weekend.
A quarter are return campers; among them nine-year-old Arlo. Last year, he said, was great; he met lots of nice people, and he looks forward to making more friends.
Perhaps the most special part, he said, was the closing fire ceremony. He and other children wrote a message to their lost loved ones and burnt it in the fire; the rising smoke symbolically carried it to his relation.
The statistics about the program's success are quite staggering, Mr Thomas said. Feel the Magic's recent Victorian program, for instance, showed overall mental health and well-being improve by 12 per cent for seven to 11-year-olds (including a 16 per cent improvement in resilience and adaptability); for teenagers, 10 p.c.
This is the second year the camp has been held in New England, and Mr Thomas would like to hold it here more often.
"Ideally, we really want to come back twice a year," he said. "Some of these kids we haven't seen in 12 months; I'd rather [visit] more consistently.
"We fund ourselves. We don't charge families, so we rely on local community volunteers to get us over the line."
The camp was booked out; 60 kids applied, but unfortunately, Mr Thomas said, the organisers could only take 38, because of a lack of mentors.
"There are enough kids out there to keep our programs sustainable; we just need to be sustainable from the financial and supportive point of view. When people think of a death, and children are involved, we want them to think of Feel the Magic in this community."