Brave Heart - Lleyt on's one Happy Camper

The Cricket-mad lad will be mixing it with other kids just like him.

As Lleyton Barrow stands at the top of a 20-metre slip and slide, peering down the grassy slope, his stomach does somersaults. He’s nervous but excited as he dives onto the soapy water and glides down on his stomach, his arms stretched out like Superman.

It might be steep, but the Christchurch schoolboy has battled far scarier challenges. A group of boys egg Lleyton on, proudly baring similar scars on their chests from open heart surgeries. Like Lleyton, the other 89 kids at the day’s camp have a heart defect. Some of the volunteers do too.

The nine-year-old’s mum Claire Sword, 33, is one of them. As a kid she attended the annual Heart Kids New Zealand camp herself, which Lleyton attended for the first time this year.

“I started going to Heart Kids camp when I was 13, and it was always an amazing experience where I could just be a kid and do things like the flying fox, or sit by the bonfire and hang out with mates,” recalls Claire, who was diagnosed with Long QT syndrome, a heart rhythm disorder, after she had a cardiac arrest at age 10.

She tells, “It was the same group of us every year, so we formed special friendships, and I’d look forward to seeing them every year. I still keep in touch with many of them.”