Having worked for 10 years with the CRC, Fiona Dowling is now executive director of The Comber Romanian Orphanage Appeal, writes MICHELLE McDONAGH
LIKE MANY of the early volunteers in the notorious state-run orphanages of Romania, the experience had left a lasting impression on paediatric physiotherapist Fiona Dowling.
When she returned from her stint volunteering with an organisation called Comber for a future without orphanages in 1994, Dowling went back to her professional career, but maintained an involvement with the charity.
However, she never envisaged that over a decade later, she would end up being offered the position of executive director of Comber working to provide homes and community living for the very young people she had worked with in the orphanages.
After training in physiotherapy in Trinity College, Dubliner Dowling worked in the US for a couple of years. When she returned to Ireland, she was fortunate enough to get her “dream job” at the time as a paediatric physiotherapist in the Central Remedial Clinic (CRC) in Clontarf where she subsequently worked for 10 years.
For the last two years of her time with the CRC, she moved to Waterford to develop the physiotherapy department of the centre’s new service in the southeast.
“It was a privilege to work with the service users and their families and the CRC physio department provided me with professional development and experience that facilitated my future career development,” she explains.
It was while working in the CRC and also through her ongoing involvement as a board member for Comber that Dowling realised she really enjoyed and thrived on the challenge of developing new services in response to need, especially in the disability sector. She decided to undertake an MBA to enhance and develop her management and service development skills.
“The MBA was a completely different course from anything I had studied before and it really broadened my horizons,” she comments.
In 1994, Dowling was one of the professional volunteers placed by Comber to improve conditions in the by now infamous state-run institutions in Romania.
The orphanages were a legacy of Nicolae Ceausescu’s rule who banned birth control and left under-financed state institutions to care for the wave of abandoned children that followed. It was following his assassination in 1989 that the horrors of these institutions were exposed to the world.
The country has spent the past two decades trying to erase the appalling images of its orphanages seen around the world – of malnourished children tied to cribs and chairs, rocking back and forth and often smeared with their own excrement.
Dowling maintained contact with the organisation throughout the 1990s organising various projects in a voluntary capacity and was invited onto the board of trustees in 1998. It was while she was working as director of another international development organisation after completing her MBA that she was offered the post of executive director of Comber in 2006.
Dowling explains: “Comber’s strategic direction has evolved significantly in the last three years in response to the changing need in Romania and across the region. We now work to provide homes and community living for disabled teenagers and adults who have lived a lifetime in institutions. These young people are, of course, the children we and other aid agencies worked with in the 90s.”
Her role as executive director involves managing and developing Comber’s expanding programme in Romania in co-operation with their local partners and enhancing the organisation’s capacity in Ireland with the board of trustees. She also has the unenviable task of fund-raising in the current challenging environment and driving new programmes and opportunities.
The charity is currently developing a project with other international agencies to drive the closure of orphanages and promote the right to community living for people with disabilities in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
Now married and living in Laois with twin two-year-old boys “who have transformed our lives, brought us immeasurable joy and currently rule the roost”, Dowling’s life has changed in more ways than one over the past few years.
“I am extremely lucky to literally love my job so from that point of view my work is a very positive part of my life. However, being Comber’s only full-time member of staff in Ireland is an extremely busy role and involves international travel so in that way it is demanding,” she says.
Work-life balance, laughs Dowling, was a term she didn’t consider much until the arrival of the two boys, but one that has become a daily challenge.
“We are lucky to have an excellent childminder who is a huge support to my husband and me. I am careful to protect my time with the boys as I know that they will grow up so fast. I don’t work on Fridays, for example. I don’t think I really understood exhaustion before though.”
While life is busy, Dowling says it’s definitely a lot easier now that the twins are a bit older and more independent, leaving her and her husband a bit of time for a social life and for “doing some of the things I enjoyed pre-children”.
In terms of the future, Dowling is cautious about planning ahead as she is aware that things can work out so differently to what you expect.
However, she remarks: “I want to see Comber continue to develop so that we can finally, 20 years after the fall of Ceausescu, deliver lasting change for people with disabilities in Romania and other countries in the region.”
For further information or to support the work of Comber for a future without orphanages, go to www.comber.ie