Activities & Benefits
THE STORIES OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF STUDENTS
CHILDREN WITH LEARNING DISABILITIES, SELF ESTEEM
He’s eleven and he hates you. He puts in six tough hours every day at school learning how to fail. He has a good instructor— himself.
He can’t draw a picture, add numbers, or write a story. Never could. And he knows it. Everybody he has ever met made it clear to him that he was beneath them, a loser. Even changing schools didn’t help.
In the text books he is described as “learning disabled,” an “academic underachiever,” or “hyperactive,“ “manic,” or even just “trouble.”
Last fall, he met the first gentleman in his whole life who didn’t pass immediate judgment on him. He was a short, fuzzy fellow with large brown eyes and the kindness not to frighten an eleven year old boy.
So the boy slapped him. Then, he pushed him around and tried to hurt him, dealing with the pony the same way he dealt with everybody. But the pony’s kind eyes and patience had seen it all before.
The pony gave the boy his first “over achievement.” His first turn at bat where he was doomed to success, and his first indestructible friendship. The pony also gave him his first completed story good enough to be read aloud by the teacher and It was even illustrated.
Some of the kids told him it was a good story. He said, “Thanks.”
ADULTS WITH HEAD INJURIES, PROGRESS
She couldn’t remember the words. She’s 25 years old and has been in an institution since those last terrifying moments before her head went through the windshield. She came back to life in a wheelchair.
Clinically, part of the problem is “short-term memory loss.” She couldn’t even remember that one day followed another. Much of the rest of it is a fear of going outside. The same “outside” where it happened.
Last spring, a Horse Power volunteer team helped her into the saddle on a friendly brown creature named Snuffy. They turned left, turned right, and clopped along together through the great barn doors and into a warm sun outside.
By the third session she recalled a small piece of data from her short term memory. It was his name: Snuffy.
A few days later she remarked to the nurses that it was “four days until Snuffy.” “Snuffy,” she explained, “happens on Thursday afternoons.”
It was her first complete sentence in over a year. It wasn’t her best sentence, though. That came later. The day she got out of the wheelchair.
SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL ABUSE, TRUST
It starts with touching. Sometimes it is dark.
With the thick smell of whiskey and the power of strong arms. It leads to the life-changing conclusions that even those who should be trusted must want something.
And you know what they want; they are big and strong and you can’t stop them. So, you simply stop trusting. Of course, when you stop trusting, you must also stop loving. Especially yourself.
You certainly can’t trust those who are bigger than you. And you certainly can’t trust those who are stronger.
A horse is bigger and stronger but it doesn’t touch you.
Funny thing about a horse. You love it and it loves you back.
It’s much stronger than you, but you can control it. On a horse, you make the decisions.
You can stop a horse.
And she was in control.
You can learn to stop a horse. You can learn to stop a person.
You can learn to start a life.
You can trust a horse.
CHILDREN WITH CEREBRAL PALSY, CONTROL
It just happens. Cerebral Palsy.
Why does it have to happen at all? Why should a twelve year old have to have the full and excited mind of any boy his age and be bound and gagged in a body he just can’t control?
His arms, head and legs don’t move when he wants them to.
And they do move when he wants to be still.
For his entire life, people have been looking down at him in his wheel chair with kind smiles and caring voices. They have taught him many things – how to use his computer to talk. How to manipulate the pointer wrapped around his head. A head teeming with ideas, dreams and hopelessness. For he has also learned that he is different. Different and lesser.
Enter “Sea Biscuit.”
The same caring faces which had looked down into the wheelchair for twelve years were now, miraculously, beneath him. He looked down at them. The despair is retreating now, giving way to determination.
This twelve year old resolves to hold the reins with unwilling fingers, and raises his head steady and high. After ten thousand tries, despair is on the run. He is taking more chances.
He even entered a horse show in October and steered his way through the obstacles, with his mother crying, for the first time, because of something he did, instead of something that “ just happened.”
