David Stonehouse Features

Dr. Dan and the kids at Christie Lake

Psychiatrist Dan Offord tells David Stonehouse why he's returned for a 43rd season to the camp for children near Perth.

Camp director Dan Offord listened in stunned silence as he walked the lakeshore with his young charge. The lad had been kicked out of his first foster home years ago. He was shuttled to a second home, but he soon wasn't welcome there either. Foster care officials found him a third place, then a forth.

The child psychiatrist in Dr. Offord knew this boy was blaming himself for the revolving door he seemed to be trapped in.

"How do you live?" Dr. Offord asked.

"I just take it one day at a time."

It is heart-wrenching moments like this one two summers ago that can move Dan Offord to tears: the stories of children abused, the revelations of long-harboured feelings of being unwanted and worthless.

Perhaps it is confronting the harsh realities of life that keeps him going back to Christie Lake Camp near Perth year after year. Certainly, it is a deep-seated interest in troubled children that is not just a professional curiosity but a personal passion.

The 65-year-old renowned psychiatrist from McMaster University in Hamilton is now in his 43rd season as director of the retreat for poor and troubled youth.

There, he is away from lofty psychiatric theory and stuffy academia. There, he sees pre-teen turmoil first-hand. And, there -- where the campers and counsellors know little of his impressive professional credentials -- he is simply the folksy jowly-faced fella they call Dr. Dan.

"It's very different from academic life. Most academics, I mean, what the hell would they be doing in a camp for the summer? It's nuts. But this is an interesting life -- it's a little unusual. It suits me," he says, flashing a smile as he sits in an armchair in the living room of his Ottawa home.

"I like the people very much at camp -- love the kids. I've enjoyed it very much. It's enriched my life."

Nursing a lifelong affinity for the plight of the underdog, Dr. Offord has not only distinguished himself in North America for his research in child psychiatry but has dedicated himself to the improving the lives of the hundreds of children who have streamed through Christie Lake.

The mission at the camp is to embrace poor children between the ages of nine and 14 and nurture them with authority. It builds their self-esteem through sports like swimming, teaches them skills like canoeing so they will learn how to work with others, and huddles them around a campfire so they will discover community and camaraderie. It brings in speakers to inform and inspire.

The 90-acre retreat was created in 1922 by Judge John F. McKinley, who wanted a place to nurture juvenile boys. It remained Christie Lake Camp for Boys until 1991, when the board of directors relented to ounting pressure and first admitted girls.

It takes in 120 youth each summer, and employs up to 80 teens and young adults as counsellors. Staff loyalty is high -- many return year after year. The pay is meagre, though older staff can earn scholarships to university.

Tom Pritchard took his adopted son there a few years back. It reaffirmed his strongly-held belief in the camp and its worth and bolstered the spirits of his troubled son.

"It was probably the best six weeks of his life. He had a tremendous traumatic childhood and stuff -- that's a longer story," Mr. Pritchard says. "He thrived up there."

Mr. Pritchard went to the camp as a youngster and unhesitatingly sings its praises. The 41-year-old British Columbia social worker calls it" the most profound influence of my personal and professional development.

"It's because of the tremendous mentorship that occurred there, certainly under the leadership of Dan Offord but also with the number of high-quality older peers or adults who were working there at the time," he says over the phone from his office at the B.C. Ministry of Children and Families.

"You wouldn't believe the number of people who moved from Christie Lake and went into the helping profession -- whether it was teaching, childcare work or as nurses or doctors -- all kinds of people like that."

One of 15 children from a blended family, Tom Pritchard went to the camp for two years in the early 1970s before returning to work as a counsellor. He worked there for a dozen more summers.

At the end, Dr. Offord took him out to dinner and asked him what he planned for the future. When he confessed to having no real plans, Dr. Offord insisted he go to university.

"He recognizes the potential in people," says Mr. Pritchard, who went on to become a mental-health therapist for youth. "He's always recognized the potential in someone, rather than the problems. He seems to have that kind of leadership ability to draw that out of people, and yet he is a down-to-earth kinda guy.

"The other thing is, he's tremendously passionate and compassionate about things. He has a high kind of ethical and moral standard that is unwavering," he says.

"I didn't know until later in my professional life how well- respected he is as an academic person as well as a researcher. He never beat the drum about his big-wig psychiatry background because his love was the camp," Mr. Pritchard says. "I'm just surprised he hasn't got the Order of Canada, to be honest with you."

For his psychiatric work, Dr. Offord has won 10 awards or honours from associations or universities in the United States and Canada. He has lectured and consulted throughout North America and, in 1994, was co-chairman of the Premier's Council on Health, Well-Being and Social Justice in Ontario.

Nearly 10 years ago, he was named director of the new Centre for Studies of Children at Risk at McMaster which researches emotional and behavioral problems in children.

Another fan is former National Capital Commission chairman Jean Pigott, a former MP and political adviser to two prime ministers.

"He's one of the most remarkable men I have ever met," says Mrs. Pigott, 75, who fell victim to his persuasiveness nine years ago when she agreed to come on board as founding chairwoman of his Centre for Studies of Children at Risk.

She lauds his work both at the centre and Christie Lake.

"The lessons he learns from those kids from Christie Lake camp, he takes back to teach the people at McMaster. He always seems to be fed by what happens at the camp, the direct contact with the kids," she says."That's his workshop. It recharges his batteries."

She enthuses about how he uses swimming and canoeing to build the confidence and self-esteem of his campers, then adds: "I don't think he is a softie, you know. I think he can be quite a disciplinarian. He can say `That's nonsense -- c'mon!' But that's what kids want, too, you know."

David Robert Dan Offord was born in Ottawa on Nov. 13, 1933, and lived a middle-class existence as the only surviving child of a chemist and secretary -- an older sister had died of a rare disease before he was born.

His mother taught him the unfairness of life, openly talking with her son about inequities of the world. He remembers the first time he witnessed racism at work.

"I remember once we were on vacation and stopped in a motel at the same time as a black family that tried to get a room, but couldn't. She was shocked and wrote to the paper," he says."I was always scared as a kid that all the big problems would be solved before I grew up. It was a huge thing inside of me. I wished I could grow up faster because these were exciting things to try to do something about," he says."It was burning inside of me."

That passion led him to medical school at Queen's University in Kingston. And it was in the middle of that, in 1956, when a friend asked him if he would come to Christie Lake to be program director for the summer.

The 22-year-old arrived with fond memories of his days as a camp counsellor at YMCA and disabled children's camps. He was astounded at the chaos that confronted him.

"It was unbelievable. I couldn't get the kids to do anything. It was a different world. Nice kids, you know, but not civilized," he recalls now. "There were fights. They never shut up -- couldn't get them to shut up around the campfire."

But instead of fleeing, he found himself fascinated: Could he ever get these troublemakers under control?

That year, he had to choose what kind of doctor he wanted to be and found himself wanting to help children. He chose pediatrics but spent most of his two months at a children's hospital watching youngsters die of leukemia.

He decided to pursue child psychiatry instead.

He worked first in the United States, teaching at universities in Florida and Pennsylvania in the 1960s. Married with a young family, he decided he wanted his children to grow up in Canada and took a job with the Royal Ottawa Hospital in 1972. But, dissatisfied with the management at that time, he left there and joined McMaster in 1978.

Every summer, though, since being hired as camp director in 1958, he would spend at Christie Lake.

He no longer feels the panic he had as a child, afraid that all the world's inequities will be will be fixed before he can become involved.

"It's not like you solve them forever," he says, then pulls the camp into an analogy.

"Christie Lake, in a sense, is stable -- kids come back and staff come back, but it's fragile too. It can fall apart," he says.

"On the human front, every generation has to re-establish again the values that are important," he says. "I'm thinking of ways to help the next generation.

"In terms of my academic work, I want to bring in young people and train them better than I was trained. And at camp I'm very interested in opening pathways for children, or to help them."

And there is no sign he is anywhere near ready to retire. He's newly married -- his first wife died after being hit by a car in 1992 -- and back living in Ottawa. He keeps an apartment in Hamilton and has convinced the university to keep him on past retirement age.

"As long as my health holds up, I want to keep going. Temperamentally (retirement) isn't for me. All the data suggests too that the best way is to insure your health is to do something you feel good about. And I enjoy my work -- I enjoy the challenges and I enjoy the people I work with."