Ballytobin, 2008 – Giving Back

We were seventeen people, all either parents of or actual graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy, a boarding school in New Hampshire. Our week-long trip gave us a sampling of a program that each winter offers two seniors at Exeter a term abroad. While our trip seemed to pass in a blur, these teenagers spend three months with the fifty residents and forty permanent staff of the farm. In the words of the farm’s website, Camphill Ballytobin “was established as a therapeutic farm for children with multiple disabilities and disturbances. Many of the children are autistic or psychotic and most have been deprived of a healthy family life. In the wholesome setting of a small farm, children live in large, family-centered houses and are taught with a mixture of classroom work, art, individual therapies and craft.”

Ballytobin’s founder is Patrick Lydon, an Exeter and Yale graduate who surrendered conventional ambitions to start Ballytobin, one of many such farms in Europe. Patrick and his wife Gladys, our hosts for the week, raised their four, now-grown, children on the farm, and acted as our guides and inspirations through the work.

Where to start? Landing at Shannon with Liam, my middle son, we were bussed to our B&B by Callum Lydon, Patrick’s youngest. Callan, a small town that abuts Ballytobin, is two hours by car from Shannon, and as we passed, by turn, through farmland and pub-lined villages, I fancied that my week would consist of effortless sweeping and Guinness. Not so. The next morning it became clear that our group had an enormous task to fulfill. We were shown a series of cavernous, barn-like rooms that held every conceivable piece of rubbish, both antique and recent, with the heaviest items being scores of three-hundred pound church pews that Patrick wanted to transfer to another site. We were tasked with vacating the rooms so that a theatre group could perform there in August (and they have, in a play written about the famine).

Heavy work, indeed. Almost comically, however, our group had not been selected for strength—only four of us were grown men, and the rest included two women over sixty and three children. Perforce, the cleaning of the workhouse evolved into a perfect division of labour: those who could lift, did. My son Liam spent his first two days climbing tentatively over detritus no adult could stand on. By week’s end he was using a jackhammer.

The history of the workhouse is told in different versions. After a particularly good day of work we enjoyed a presentation by Joe Kennedy, a local historian who eschewed the anti-English view of Callan to explain that the famine and the workhouse were complex issues. We learned that families were divided both by gender (we were cleaning the women’s side) and parents from children. The gender division was said to be a necessary cruelty to prevent reproduction; Joe had nothing critical to say of this, as the alternative was starvation. After he spoke, however, a man in our small audience stood up to recite a thirty-minute, self-composed poem about the workhouse whose intent was to demonize its English masters. However one viewed the Callan workhouse—our poet used the expression genocide—the people present were far closer to the potato famine than one could imagine, and the existence of Cherryfield, the famine graveyard holding three thousand souls, a sobering constant.

An American camera crew was making a film about the workhouse, and I was interviewed. Why did I come? I said I’d read an article about Patrick Lydon’s life and wanted to be here, but I added that, once the work had started, the group had cohered magically. I remember it affecting Liam, too—one day at lunch, soon after we’d finished our meal (most of our food was from the farm), he asked me eagerly whether he could walk back to the worksite alone to continue.

We also spent some time at Ballytobin. The actual care of the people there is the special and exclusive province of the staff, but we mingled for three days. We participated in an outdoor ceremony that interspersed Christian and secular rituals, choral singing and the sound of church bells that I think was the most moving act of worship I will ever see. We walked to a bonfire surrounded by over a hundred people that, again, was the occasion for song. Most importantly, we came to love some of the people who, living at Ballytobin permanently without kin, treated us like family.

The buzzword one hears used nowadays to describe what Liam and I did is “voluntourism.” Increasingly in North America, retired, leisure-rich adults are combining a desire to see the world with a desire to help. Our work at Callan didn’t feel like tourism, but it felt good. The great secret of good Samaritanism is that it’s addictive. I would go back tomorrow.