NEWS | Wednesday, 30 July 2008

Social teamwork by Brian Tonna & Co. at St Patrick’s

Early on a Saturday morning, all employees and partners of Brian Tonna & Co., Accounting and Audit firm and member of Nexia International, gathered at St Patrick’s Salesian School (Residential Children Services) in Sliema. Instead of wearing the office uniform and carrying laptops, the team wore T-shirts and shorts and were equipped with brushes and paint buckets all set for a hard day’s manual work.
Fr Antoine Farrugia, Head of Care, welcomed the enthusiastic team and gave them a tour around St Patrick’s, particularly the boys’ living quarters where the actual work was to be done. The resident boys had been taken out to the beach for the day so that their rooms could be worked upon and re-decorated while they were away. A group of industrious office girls were assigned to sew new curtains while others were shown how to use a paint roller. The lads’ job was to first scrape the flaky old paint from the walls, paint them and then also to whitewash the high ceilings. A separate group worked in the overflowing store room that hoarded a range of objects from mattresses to jigsaw puzzles. The clean up of this store filled a large skip to the brim.
By eight in the evening, after almost 12 hours of continuous work, all the assigned rooms were spotlessly clean, with new curtains put up, giving the place a fresh look with all the furniture back in place. Fr Antoine appeared rather pleased at the splendid makeover done to the living quarters by the energetic volunteers. He repeatedly thanked the workers for their efforts and congratulated them for having managed to reach their targets on time.
The sight of such a group of young accountants, auditors and office clerks together with their company directors, physically exhausted with paint marks everywhere was highly unusual, and yet in the evening, the great sense of satisfaction at having experienced voluntary work and of having used their time productively to help the young resident boys of St Patrick’s was worth every moment of planning, effort and teamwork that were needed to get this job done. For Brian Tonna and Co. business means quality and Voluntary Work is no different: at the end of the day management and staff were happy with what they had achieved, and all the more so because it meant going the extra mile in aid of a good cause.