By Meaghan Moriarty
A person’s health and safety is very important and can change in the blink of an eye. When it comes to children, their health and safety is always on our minds as we try to protect them from anything and everything that could go wrong or hurt them in the world. Nevertheless, children always manage to get hurt or sick sometimes. When visiting the Christine Revell Children’s Home it was apparent that they are trying to keep the children healthy and safe the best they can. The Christine Revell Children’s Home is home to 49 children ages zero to five. These children have either been abandoned, abused, or neglected and their parents have lost their rights to their children. Parents, given their restrictions from the court, can go and visit their children at the home, but need to be supervised. The Christine Revell Children’s Home offers a safe place for children where they can just be kids. However, some safety aspects could be better.
When we visited, we were outside playing with the kids a majority of the time. There were a couple swings, a playhouse, and a small jungle gym for the children to play on; all the kids loved to climb up to the top. When they would get up there, sometimes they would knock each other or push each other back and forth and then they would climb back down just to do it all over again. When watching them do this, all the kids would try to climb down at one time. If one child was going to slow, the child behind them would nudge or push them to make them go faster. Not only is this dangerous normally, but especially in this situation since the jungle gym was on a slab of concrete. If any of the kids were to fall, they could easily have a serious injury. Along with that, the jungle gym was also right next to a big concrete wall with barbed wire at the top. So, not only could they get injured from the slab of concrete, but the wall was close enough that they could also fall against the concrete wall and get hurt too. On top of all that, the care takers were sitting down on a bench talking and just supervising the children. Just from being there for a couple hours, I caught a couple kids who could have fallen and hurt themselves if I wasn’t there to catch them. I understand that there are a lot of kids to watch, but I would at least have one caretaker be at the jungle gym to keep a closer eye and try to prevent a serious injury from happening.
Another unsafe aspect of outside was that there was an open water drain going through the middle of the outside play area. Most of the children just seemed to ignore it, but some children were playing in it. They would put their feet in there and try to splash the little amount of water that was sitting there around. However, I saw a couple of children try to lick the water that was sitting there. There were pebbles, dirt, and leaves all in the pipe with the water, which the children could easily “drink” or put in their mouths when trying to lick the water. Children tend to put many things in their mouths that they shouldn’t, but that was just very unsanitary and not safe,
I loved visiting the Christine Revell Children’s Home and had a great time playing with the children. Unfortunately, there were some things that weren’t very safe for the children. I think that nothing has been done about this, most likely due to a lack of money or donations. There are many other things that the children need or could use that are more important that fixing part of the jungle gym, but I think it is important and needs to be dealt with sooner rather than later to prevent a serious injury from occurring.
