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Our home is our castle.

For the children it will even be a magic castle, where the real world and the world of make believe walk hand in hand in every nook and every cranny.

Can we realize what could happen in a child’ brain when that entire world falls apart from one moment to the other? I doubt it.

Reasons may be many, but that which concerns us here, today, is really grievous: and that is sickness.

The sickness that brings bodily pain, but can hurt even more when the day to day world which filled and caressed the life of the child is suddenly torn away.

Going to school, playing with friends, the warmth of the shouts, of the fighting and of the caresses of siblings when returning home.

All this can be ruined from a moment to the other and create such an emptiness in the child’s soul that everything that may have to be done to recover its health may seem even crueller.

The child is unable to fully understand what is happening and will think it totally unfair that it is taken away from its daily surroundings.

These are the pillars of its castle, where it obtains the support to carry out its task as well and as best it can – the most important in the whole world: living and growing up.

How can it grow up and be happy if its everyday world turns upside down?

It will hold on with all its strength to the comfort afforded by its parents and other familiar and friendly faces to which it is used in its new, but strange environment, which is the hospital, but will doubtlessly feel that something is missing.

We are meeting here today precisely to open “a home away from home”.

It is far away but is a home and that, in difficult moments, makes all the difference.

A home is a lap, an embrace, a remedy against discomfort and pain.

The hospital where we are cared for is sufficiently near for us to reach it quickly whenever necessary, but sufficiently far out for us to forget it when this is more important than knowing it is nearby.

The Ronald McDonald Children’s Foundation understood through instances of real life – real life instances are those which normally take us further away – that it was possible to lessen the situation of children requiring prolonged treatments.

And we are today opening the first “home away from home” next door to D. Estefânia Hospital, a paediatric hospital with a long and skilled experience.

With many good men involved, permit me the use of the beautiful mediaeval expression, and many supports obtained, we now have our first “castle” ready to receive its inhabitants, who will be able to discover its nooks and crannies and thus forget for a time the big bad wolf prying outside.

Thank you all for your involvement and solidarity in this Project.

This is not yet finished. Well on the contrary: its true role is now really starting.

I have no doubts that this will be the port of call that children and their families really need.

And I also want to believe that this home built with love is just the first of a continuing project.

While there are children and families who require a “home away from home”.