Teenagers from the Sydney Children’s Choir have raised almost $10,000 for the family of one of their members, who lost their house at Balmoral in the Green Wattle Creek fire just before Christmas.
Twenty singers from the choir caught the train from Sydney to Picton on Sunday to visit Balmoral, where Gabriel Kam, 16, and his parents, Justin and Helena, lost their home on 21 December.
“By the time we got to Balmoral they were in tears,” Helena Kam told Guardian Australia. “To them it all seems unreal.”
The group toured the town and put on an impromptu concert for Rural Fire Service volunteers at the Balmoral fire station, which itself nearly burned down.
Choristers Carmella Reznick and Veronica Vella, both 15, said they and their friends wanted to do something to support Gabriel, who has been a part of the choir since he was eight. The group began a fundraising campaign when they learned Gabriel might have had to quit because his parents could not afford to support his singing commitments while rebuilding their house.
“We all love Gabe so much … he is such a big part of our community,” Reznick said. “We are so grateful for all the support and money raised so far. And we are so proud of Gabe.”
“The choir is like a second family,” Vella said. “I don’t really know what I expected [to see at Balmoral] because you can’t really prepare for something like this. I had seen pictures of it before but seeing it in person is a lot more confronting.”
Friends and Sydney Children’s Choir mates of Gabriel Kam, whose family lost their house in Balmoral, visited the town on Sunday. pic.twitter.com/xkRPQqy7Ok
— Helen Davidson (@heldavidson) December 30, 2019
The Kams are currently staying in the house of a friend who is on holiday.
It’s a good interim measure, Justin said, because they don’t feel like they’re imposing. But when the friends return, the family will be couch surfing, relying on the generosity of friends and neighbours. They were left with little beyond the clothes on their backs and the land they had so carefully built their house on. Even their shoes melted as they ran from the fire.
Justin spoke to Guardian Australia while helping to unload another semi-trailer of donations for the village on Saturday.
“The generosity of strangers is overwhelming,” he said. “But it comes in waves. You sit down and think OK, I’m OK, and then something else pops up. It ebbs and flows, the intensity of what happens.”
They are hoping to have the electricity turned back on at their block so they can live in a caravan while they rebuild, but the meters have all been burned. There is no water or functioning sewerage system.
“You kind of expect [the challenges], but when it’s one after another after another, you just think: just stop, stop, stop, stop, stop,” Justin said. “It’s the grind of the processes. You’re not sleeping well, you’re not eating well, you look at food and you’re hungry but you can’t eat it.”
He said Gabriel’s friends in the choir were “doing more for us than Wingecaribee council”.
“What the kids are doing is for the community, that’s the important bit,” he said. “We’re really chuffed. We’re just bursting at the seams with how proud we are of these kids.”
