As I write this, eighteen months have elapsed since Sam and I stepped off the plane at Sydney’s Kingsford Smith Airport as travel-hardened Africa veterans, and less than a week since we returned from our second trip to Africa, this time with Benison accompanying us for the first time.
The recent trip was just a family holiday—two weeks in South Africa and Namibia, rather than ten countries and six months on the road.
In some ways, however, it presented as a microcosm of the first, Sam initially anxious and counting down the days until our return to Australia, then relaxing into the vibe of Africa and becoming open again to new experiences.
However, the anxiety and stress that he had endured in 2015, particularly in South Africa and Namibia, was far, far less evident this trip.
Familiar folk we encountered remarked on the difference in Sam. Lee, the manager of The Backpacker in Cape Town, sat down with Sam for an interview in front of the video camera. Sam fired off question after question for minutes, until I had to stop him and tell him to wind it up.
I thought back to the interviews we’d struggled over in the early months of 2015. The thirty-second pauses, Sam scrambling to think of ten questions to ask, his inability to follow a lead in the conversation.
Lee was stunned. ‘He couldn’t talk anything like that before. He couldn’t even keep still.’
A week later, at breakfast on our first morning at Chameleon Backpackers in Windhoek, we ran into one of their drivers, Fernando, the same one who’d picked Sam and me up from the airport on our first visit to Windhoek in 2015.
‘He is much better now,’ Fernando said without prompting. ‘He is much calmer than the last time.’
Benison and I shared a look of satisfaction. ‘Yes,’ I replied, ‘he seems to be enjoying this trip much more.’
We were worried, you see, that much of the hard work of that earlier trip had been undone by the realities of life back in Sydney. The year 2016 was a difficult one for our family, and as Benison and I dived back into our workaday lives we just didn’t have the time and energy to focus so totally on Sam.
Fortunately for us, we stumbled across an amazing teacher’s aide, Virginia, who we employed privately two days a week to support Sam at school. Virginia had worked as a behavioural therapist with children with autism previously but, more importantly, just got Sam and his needs.
Throughout the past year, Virginia has built on the hard work Sam and I put in during our first African trip, extending him further and encouraging independence. She has engineered conversations between Sam and all his teachers, coordinated movie dates with his peers and supervised his work experience placement at Target. In short, she’s been a life saver.
On the final afternoon of last week’s holiday, we visited an animal sanctuary an hour’s drive from Windhoek. Sam, who’d been whinging all morning about going, ended up loving it. ‘Things go fast when you enjoy yourself,’ he said.
‘Yes,’ Benison explained. ‘There’s an expression for that: Time flies when you’re having fun.’
As we were preparing to leave the next morning for the airport, I filmed Sam having one last conversation with Rosa, a staff member at Chameleon. Sam had spoken to Rosa on our first visit, once again in front of the camera. She was astonished at the difference as he casually chatted with her about her family and work. She asked whether we had been doing a lot of therapy of some sort. Well, yes, we had, of course.
On arriving back home in Sydney, I checked my emails, and was stoked to receive one that Benison and I had been sweating on for a while. It was from David Trembath, the Griffith University researcher, outlining the preliminary results from his research on the video interviews recorded with Sam during 2015.
A comparison of the videos taken early and late in the trip demonstrated that speech skills critical to good conversations—such as staying on topic, body position and eye contact—all increased in Sam over the course of the six months, while abrupt changes in topic reduced. One key parameter, ‘cues from Dad’, dropped from twenty per cent of conversations early in the trip to zero later in the trip. The research’s conclusion was that ‘the journey was associated with positive changes in social-communication skills.’
That is, it worked.
For all that, Sam remains Sam. He still talks way too loud, and way too much about his obsessions (currently Tintin and 1980s children’s videos, but no doubt that will change). He still doesn’t get that it’s not a great idea to comment on all the ‘black people’ in South Africa! While he’s holding his own in maths, school work presents an increasing challenge. And while we’ve been teaching him about sarcasm and idioms, he can still be delightfully literal.
One night in Stellenbosch, the picture-postcard perfect university town in the wine region near Cape Town, Sam scanned our dinner menu, then looked up at us with a slightly pained expression on his face. ‘There is nothing here I want to eat.’
‘Yes, there is,’ I said. ‘What about the Monster Burger?’
Then it dawned on Benison and me. ‘Sam, it’s not a burger made from monsters. “Monster” just means it’s big.’
‘Oh,’ said Sam, with visible relief. When his monster-sized beef burger arrived he happily chowed it down.
Africa was good for Sam, good for me. Part of me wants us to remain there forever, but we have two other sons in Australia who need us, aging parents and work commitments. The challenge will be to sustain the good work, to somehow recreate our own Africa at home, to challenge Sam to embrace independence and to get the most possible out of life.
He remains a work in progress.