Childhelp center is running for 'peaceful' trees

As David Henry walks through campus, he’s met with salutations left and right.

“Hey Chaplain Dave!” Staff and children shout as he passes.

When he gets to the recreation field, the noise gets turned down.

When he reaches his destination, the only sound left is his feet on the grass.

The only warm-blooded creature left is Star, one of the village cats looking for a hand to play with.

As he walks the winding road, he’s got the silence in the air, the nature in his eyes, the breeze in his face. But the one thing he doesn’t have is a break from the sun …
The Alice C. Tyler Village of Childhelp in Lignum is in the Communities Take Root competition for one of 25 fruit tree orchards.

“We’re a long-term residential treatment center serving a capacity of 67 children ages five through 14,” said John Bachand, director of the village. “These are children that are victims of abuse and neglect or at risk for abuse and neglect.”

The 270-acre village has 170 staff members and also houses a private day school serving the counties of Culpeper, Spotsylvania, Greene, Fauquier, Madison, Fredericksburg city and other surrounding communities.

“Children from the community that can’t be maintained the in the public school setting can come here for private day school,” Bachand said.

Henry’s destination and the destination for the orchard is the village’s “labyrinth,” a quarter-mile path that winds within a space 100-feet long and 50-feet wide.

“It’s basically a trail,” said Henry, the chaplain and child advocate for the village. “It’s not like a maze where you have dead ends but it’s a trail that goes to a certain point and then you come out.”

The one thing missing from the labyrinth is shade for the children to walk under. But the village is in the process of adding that final piece to the puzzle.

“The way this is designed — it’s meant to be a part of the orchard,” Henry said. “That’s what we’re planning the trees for.”

There are 100 communities in the summer-long contest and 25 are awarded an orchard. At the end of each month, the top-five vote getters are awarded the trees, taken off the board and the next five move up in the standings.

“A lot of people have kind of bought into the voting and gotten excited about us,” Henry said. “So it’s been a good morale booster for our community also.”

The voting is in its second month of competition, and five communities will win an orchard at the end of each month until Aug. 31.

“If you came back in five years this would be like a kind of orchard forest and we’d be walking through the trees,” Henry said.

The village is currently in eighth place on the leader board. Voters can vote once a day by logging onto communitiestakeroot.com.

“It would allow more shade here, a little more privacy,” Henry said. “As you’re walking it’s just nicer to walk through a grove than the middle of the field sometimes — especially in the summer.”

If they win, they will get 20 trees through the Fruit Tree Planting Foundation, including apple, plum, cherry and nut trees.

“We don’t really need that many,” Henry said. “So I asked them if they could give us 10 trees and they said they can make up the other 10 with shrubs.”

The labyrinth is set up as a place for the children, which are supervised at all times, to get away from it all.

“A labyrinth is a spiritual tool that’s been used for centuries by different religious groups to help people to develop their spirituality,” Henry said. “It’s a place that helps you to calm down, to find some solitude.”

The compact area allows the children to have the feeling of being by themselves while still being supervised.

“I think what David the chaplain has done here is created something that the children can use to calm themselves,” Bachand said. “To learn about taking care of plants, just take a walk when they’re frustrated, use it for recreational purposes, learn how to grow plants and take care of them — the whole cycle of life with plants and animals is what we want to teach them.”

Want to help?
Go to communitiestakeroot.com to vote once a day for Childhelp, Inc. in Lignum to get their fruit tree orchard.