Sam’s Best Shot

When I first mentioned our planned African adventure to a fellow parent of an autistic child back home in Australia, she joked, ‘You’re not going all Horse Boy on us, are you, James?’

The Horse Boy was a New York Times bestselling book in 2009, which also became a documentary. It chronicled the horse-riding journey of Rupert Isaacson, his wife, and their then five-year-old autistic son, Rowan, through Mongolia to seek the help of shamans. I think even the author now acknowledges that the benefits Rowan accrued on the journey were more due to horse-riding than any mysticism.

Children with autism need to be exposed to lots of interesting things and new experiences in order to develop. One of the reasons the trip to Mongolia was so beneficial was that Rowan could explore lots of fascinating things such as horses, streams, plants, and animals in an environment that was QUIET. The Mongolian pastureland was a quiet environment free of the things that overload the sensory system of a child with autism…

Horseback riding is a great activity. Many parents have told me that their child spoke his/her first words on a horse. Activities that combine both rhythm and balancing such as horseback riding, sitting on a ball, or swinging help stabilize a disordered sensory system.

There is a small but growing body of research around hippo-therapy—the technical term for therapeutic horse-riding—and its social, emotional and physical benefits in autism. Sam had already had enough ‘hippo’ therapy elsewhere in Africa but here in Uganda we were offered the opportunity for our own horse-boy experience; another chance to push the boundaries of his world a little bit further.

A small group from the hostel hopped onto a small boat to cross the river, while red-tailed and vervet monkeys leapt about the acacia and umbrella trees on the steep clay banks. A Cape clawless otter launched off some nearby rocks into the turquoise water as our launch chugged to the stables. We were given a talk on safety and put on helmets. ‘I look like an American footballer,’ Sam observed.

As we clambered onto our mounts, the owner of the horse-riding facility, who happened to be a fellow Australian, was very particular about making sure Sam was safe. He suggested one of his instructors walk with him ‘just in case’. I wasn’t sure if this was necessary—sometimes the line between safety and overprotection can be a fuzzy one—but I went along with the safe option.

It turned out the walking instructor wasn’t necessary, but that was easy to say in hindsight. The horses took us through the local village and farms, with subsistence plots of corn, yams, banana, coffee, jackfruit and cassava. Children ran out of mud-brick houses and yards to greet us on the side of the thin track, some naked, most not, but all smiling and waving. Girls carried babies. Teenage boys jostled each other and looked at us with half-smiles and puffed chests. A woman chopped wood. An old woman, stooped over her stick, held up her hand and said, ‘Jumbo, mzungu.’ ‘Hello, white people.’

Our path arced back towards the steep riverbanks before looping back up to the stables. Sam was happy with his horse. He’d been told the horse’s name was Jack Daniels, but Sam had decided to rename him Bullseye. Bullseye was cowgirl Daisy’s horse in the Toy Story movies. Fortunately, Sam didn’t start riding him in the same manner as Daisy rode her steed.

Back at the stables, we lingered for a chat with the Australian owner, T.J., who’d originally been a surfer from Newcastle. I quizzed him about where he believed Africa was heading. ‘Do you think they can ever break the cycle of corruption?’

‘It’s so entrenched, and so part of their culture. In the villages, they have so little that even favours are like a currency; everyone keeps a tab on who owns what, who has done favours for who and whose tribe you are in. Those that make money or get into positions where they can corruptly obtain money are expected to get what they can out of it and pay back those they owe and favour those who they’re aligned with.’

I wanted Africa’s outlook to be better, more optimistic. ‘But there are large parts of the continent that have come a long way. Look what has happened in Uganda over the last twenty years.’

‘Sure, and long may it continue. But it’s still the way that if you get power you use it to your advantage, and if you don’t work or do your job properly there is no accountability, especially in government. It all comes down to education. People talk about corruption, but the corruption is there because there aren’t enough educated people who can either hold those in power accountable or offer an alternative way, an alternative employee, an alternative candidate.’

Benison had been so concerned when I’d told her about our plans for white-water rafting. ‘Sam and white-water rafting…Are you sure that’s wise?’

As we drifted across the still, steel-blue waters, slowly approaching the roaring rapids, now audible but not yet visible, my eyes widened and my heart thumped and I began to wonder if my wife had been right. Fortunately, I’d opted for Sam and me to go in the safety boat. There were twenty other wazungu in our group, most of whom were in rafts, and a few on kayaks, either by themselves or in tandem with a guide. We’d received thorough instructions from the guide while still on shore and I was confident that Sam understood what to do if we did fall out of the boat, but still…

I looked at him, perched on the front rim of the raft. ‘Sam, are you nervous?’

The safety boat was steered by another Moses, this one being the head guide, using two long oars fixed on each side of the large inflatable raft. A metal frame steadied the centre of the raft, adding sturdiness. Moses alternated sitting on a raised seat or standing in the middle of the frame. Sam and I, his only passengers, sat on the inflated rim at the front, but we were instructed to sit down on the floor when things got bumpy and hang onto a safety rope on the outside of the rim. On the other rafts, six passengers and one guide each had a paddle and manned the outside of the craft.

The safety boat would negotiate the softer parts of the rapids, while the other rafts would go where the action was greatest. Eight sets of rapids spread over twenty-five kilometres of the Nile River sat below us. As we approached the first edge, Moses told us to sit down on the floor and hang on.

The raft tilted over the edge of the first set of falls. A dramatic set of rapids, plunging up to two metres at a single drop but over twenty metres in length, lay below us.

‘I don’t want to go down there!’ Sam yelled and stood up to jump over the side.

Moses and I both screamed for him to sit down. Hanging onto the rope with one hand as we fell, I lurched and grasped at the bottom of Sam’s life jacket as he attempted to jump out of the plunging raft. Moses also grabbed Sam by the shoulder, abandoning one of his oar handles to do so, and we secured him just as we landed at the bottom of the first of half a dozen wrenching thumps and lurches. Walls of water loomed before us, smashing into our faces, before we’d leap up again, then tilt with ridiculous speed forward and plunge again. It was like, I imagined, riding a rodeo horse, a very wet rodeo horse.

Sam punched the air. ‘I did it!’ What? Over the course of twenty seconds he’d gone from terrified to exhilarated.

The second set of rapids was soon upon us. Here we go again. Plunge, thump, lurch, heave, plunge. Over the roar of the waves I heard Sam giggle. Finally we reached some still water.

I burst into a fit of laughter. Moses joined in, shaking his head, before asking, ‘What is Quidditch?’

‘He thinks it’s like riding on a broomstick,’ I explained, as best I could.

We watched the others come down the rollercoaster we’d just negotiated. After all, we were the safety boat. One raft tipped, all its passengers tumbling down the rapids before being retrieved by the very impressive guides. These guys knew their stuff. I found out several of the guides were in the Ugandan kayak team and were heading to the World Championships in Canada the following month. One of the wazungu, an Australian, was kayaking by himself and was also incredibly skilled. He was also off to the World Championships, representing Australia, and was here to get in some practice. The rest of us were in awe of their talents, and several of the women in awe of their physiques.

On we went, gliding over the silky waters stirred by eddies and whirls and draped in the tattered remnants of lilies and reeds ripped from the shore, waiting for the rush towards the next set of rapids. The roar would build, the raft would tilt and down, down, down we’d plunge.

On smooth water once again, it was a little embarrassing just sitting in the safety boat, not having to do the paddling expected of everyone else, but I got over it and laid back and drank in the atmosphere. The Nile was magnificent, with the silver-blue currents cutting between steeply wooded banks where children would jump and wave to us from the shore. Fishermen in dugout canoes plied the waters, and cormorants and yellow-billed storks glided above and beside us. Sam thought the cormorants, with their sinewy necks ducking in and out of the water, looked like the Loch Ness monster. I could see that, but I would just never have thought of it myself.

There were no hippos or crocs above Murchison Falls so in this respect it was safe to be in the water, which was fortunate because every raft was upended at least once. The guides waiting in kayaks would haul them to safety. We approached the last set of rapids, Sam giggling and squealing in anticipation. It was a doozy, but being in the safety boat we descended a section that was calmer than the centre of the rapid.

‘No, Sam, we can’t. We’re in the safety boat and have to go in the easier section so we can help people if needed,’ I said.

He looked at me, thinking about what had just been said. ‘What does event mean?’

A wide grin emerged, and he looked across the river. ‘Yes, this is an event!’ The other rafts came down, two out of three capsizing but everyone safe. Sam laughed at their tumbling exits from the craft. He turned to Moses. ‘I want there to be more rapids. Let’s round it up to ten.’

Sam wasn’t content with that. ‘No, let’s round it up to ten. Ten is a more rounded number.’

Moses looked at me, perplexed; I waved to him to ignore it. Half of the troubadours were now in the water in their life vests, swimming or just drifting with the steady current as we approached our landing site.

I was stunned. ‘Really?’ Was this the same boy who only a month or two earlier had needed the encouragement of three people for ten minutes to jump into Lake Malawi for a few seconds? Now he was all for it.

He jumped into the river and swam alongside our raft for a few hundred metres to the bank. I was feeling pretty damn special. It had been an event.

Sam was tired and crabby as we ate the late lunch provided by the raft company and changed out of our wet clothes. I let him be; it had been a big day. The troop piled into the truck that would take us back to the hostel, the group electrified by the experience. Heavy rain whipped the truck, making the deep gutters run with toffee-coloured water, distracting the small children who jumped and splashed in the water instead of giving the ubiquitous wave and ‘Hello!’ to the passing wazungu.

That evening over Skype, Benison was relieved to hear we’d survived and thrilled Sam had gone swimming in the Nile. She said it was just as well I was travelling with Sam rather than her as she just wouldn’t have even considered this sort of activity, or taken this type of risk. She was guilty, in her own words, of underestimating Sam’s abilities, of being overprotective. We were both aware of the ways those attitudes, however benevolent, could limit him over his life.

Much later, a friend in Australia alerted us to an NPR podcast called Invisibilia, and specifically an episode called ‘How to become Batman’. It recounted a famous Harvard psychology experiment from 1963, when psychology students were given rats and told they had been specifically bred for high intelligence, as measured by their ability to navigate mazes. Other students were given rats and told they had been bred for dullness in navigating mazes. The rats, however, had no such breeding; they were ordinary lab rats randomly assigned to the two groups.

The students were asked to teach the rats a range of skills including finding their way through a maze. The result? The ‘bright’ rats markedly outperformed the ‘dull’ rats, despite the fact that they shouldn’t have. The students, who were unaware they were part of the experiment, were not influencing the rats’ performances intentionally; it was their own expectations of the rats that caused the difference between the two groups. In subtle ways—such as how they handled the rats, eye contact, the enthusiasm of their encouragement—the ‘bright’ rats responded to the higher expectations of their students. It’s called the experimenter expectancy effect, or, when observed outside the laboratory in the real world, the Pygmalion effect. This effect has been reproduced consistently in studies since the 1960s, including research showing that a teacher’s expectations can influence a student’s IQ scores.

The Invisibilia episode then went on to describe the experiences of the blind community where a prevailing attitude that ‘blind people can’t do those things’ frequently limits the achievements of the blind by encouraging a sort of ‘learned helplessness’.

The prevailing experience was contrasted with the story of Daniel Kish, a man about my age who lives in California. Daniel has been blind almost all his life, after his eyeballs were removed because of cancer when he was an infant, but he’s able to confidently navigate the world almost as efficiently as he could if he could see, using echolocation, a self-taught technique of making clicking noises with his tongue and listening to the sound bouncing off objects surrounding him, kind of like sonar. He’s like a real life Batman.

Right from the word go, Daniel’s mother let her blind but adventurous little boy climb fences and trees, run around playgrounds and parks, and eventually ride a bike, all possible by using his clicking tongue. Yes, she was afraid of him getting injured or worse, and he did come to grief many times, but she was also determined to not let him be dragged down by the stultifying effect of low expectations. She banished her fears, and Daniel thrived.

So ironically, the enemy of high expectations can be love. It is understandable, of course, for parents of children, especially children with disabilities, to be fearful of the dangers of grasping a learning moment. Benison’s love for Sam would have prevented her from allowing him to go white-water rafting, but she knew well enough the importance of letting him go, to have allowed the two of us to walk through that airport departure gate in Sydney. With high expectations, remarkable things can occur.