Sam's Best Shot

by James Best

  CHAPTER 7

  Thinking outside the square

  As we left the Drakensberg Mountains, heading back to rejoin the Baz Bus at Kokstadt, Sam started to work on me again about an early return. ‘I don’t think we should go to Namibia. Let’s go back to Sydney.’

  I sighed. ‘No, Sam, we have to go to Namibia now.’

  ‘But it’s got an ugly name.’

  That was a new one. ‘What’s wrong with Namibia’s name?’

  He tried a different tack. ‘It has malaria.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘but we are flying to Windhoek, and there is no malaria there.’

  ‘But if you get malaria you can’t get rid of it. I learnt about that in science.’

  I bet he hadn’t. I bet he’d been reading up on the net. I ducked and weaved again. ‘Well, we’ll go to Windhoek. It has good internet there, so you’ll like it. And we’ll take it from there.’

  ‘And then we’ll go home in May.’

  ‘We’ll see.’

  As we rolled into Kokstadt the driver locked the car doors. Perhaps he did that in every place. Maybe. Kokstadt was a large and busy town, but not quite a city. It sat under a bald mountain that resembled a plate of half-melted ice cream. A man carried a bunch of ostrich feather brooms. A gaggle of girls spilled out of a KFC, singing in Zulu.

  We had a half-hour wait at the same old roadside facility, outside the restaurant. We ate pizza out of the box. After fifty minutes I rang, to be told the bus would be another twenty minutes. Once again stranded in dwindling light, I kept a close eye on Sam and the bags.

  He pestered me to buy ice cream at the convenience store near us so I took a punt and gave him twenty rand. First, he walked in the exit. A bad start. The store security guard was now eyeing him. In the dying light, I was simultaneously trying to watch him inside the store and the bags at my feet, while scanning the road for the bus. I could see Sam through the window, springing around the checkout, holding the twenty-rand note and a Magnum in each hand. After a few headshakes from the shop assistants, I realised he was a few rand short. I dashed over and handed him some more money over the exit barrier, while keeping half an eye on the bags. He completed the transaction! Yes! Even the shop assistants seemed happy.

  This was a step up from his previous shopping experience, buying a cheese and bacon roll at Baker’s Delight back home in Leichhardt. This was exactly the sort of experience we were seeking in Africa, pushing Sam’s boundaries and expanding his skills into new areas. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t trying and tiring. The bus arrived, and we pounced onto the bucket seats like children scrambling for the last spots in a game of musical chairs.

  On the bus, for the first time ever, Sam challenged me to a staring competition. I didn’t know he knew such a thing existed. It was quite strange having a staring competition with someone who has ‘significant impairment in quality of gaze’, one of the diagnostic criteria for autism. Some studies have shown that autistic individuals look more at the mouth of the person speaking to them, rather than the eyes like most of us. As you can imagine, this often leads to social misunderstanding.

  Anyway, I won the staring competition even though I didn’t want to. Sam won the second round by pretending to poke me in the eye. Full points for lateral thinking.

  Towards the end of the bus trip Sam made a strange request, out of the blue and way too loud: ‘Dad, be like Hitler.’ I knew what he meant. Months earlier Sam had stumbled across a YouTube clip of the movie Downfall where Hitler completely loses it, ranting and screaming at his entourage. Sam had been intrigued and often re-enacted the scene, or alternatively got me or his brothers to do so. He wanted me to shout ‘Nein, nein, nein!’ I was not going to do this in a bus half full of German tourists. I tried to shush him and ignore him at the same time.

  He tried again, shouting, ‘Dad! Be Hitler!’

  I hissed at him. ‘Sam, don’t say that!’

  Again, way too loudly, ‘Why? Because there are Germans on the bus?’

  I winced and shrank into my seat.

  As we drove through the extensive industrial outskirts of Durban, I realised it was much larger than the sleepy beachside city I had imagined. Sam was happy as a clam. Big cities equal fast internet, which indeed proved to be the case. We spent a fairly relaxed couple of days recharging ourselves and our devices, reorganising packs, and shopping, as well as biking down the magnificent beachfront boulevard full of skateboarders, tut-tut drivers, buskers and surf-wetted bodies, black, brown and white. A marching band went by, with dancing teenage Zulu warriors following them. Noise and colour split the high-rise buildings from the sand and surf.

  Sam and I visited an aquarium, which introduced us to myriad interesting creatures, including great white sharks, spiked lionfish and odd worm-like creatures that bobbed their blind heads out of sands at the bottom of the Indian Ocean. Trouping through the city, we passed Indian markets where stalls were fronted with open bowls of cone-shaped piles of spices, and draped with silk, and the driving rhythms of Indian pop music piped through the winding alleyways. Durbs has the largest Indian population outside India, with 1.5 million people of Indian descent in and around the city.

  At the hostel, the white South African cook, Etienne, was offering an Indian feast for dinner so I decided to sign us up. Etienne had seen Sam pacing around the communal living room earlier and asked what his story was.

  ‘He’s on the autism spectrum,’ I replied.

  Etienne beamed. ‘Oh, I love autistic people!’

  That’s not a reaction you normally get. I liked Etienne. ‘Really?’ I enquired. ‘Why?’

  ‘They think outside of the square,’ he explained. ‘They are the ones who think of things other people don’t. The person who invented fire or the wheel, they could well have been autistic.’ Etienne was right, of course. Many of the well-known geniuses through history were probably autistic. Great minds often do not think alike and can achieve great things because they think differently.

  At the excellent dinner, Sam agreed to eat Indian food for the first time. This was a big step for him, given how aromatic it was. Etienne gently encouraged Sam as he had his first taste of beef curry. Etienne conceded to Sam that using your fingers was okay when eating Indian, as long as you ate with your right hand and you did it in a certain way. He demonstrated, perching curry and rice on the end of his middle fingers and pushing it forward into his mouth with the back of his thumb. I was stunned and proud when Sam was able to do it too.

  I also filmed Sam and Etienne in one of Sam’s planned conversations for the university study, as well as recording a chat with me. Sam didn’t mind being filmed, and he liked the idea he might become a ‘famous boy’. Most of the time he didn’t notice the camera.

  Later that evening, on the rooftop outdoor dining area, I talked to Etienne and Kirk, a young white African carpenter from the Drakensberg, who was in Durban on holidays. Discussion again drifted to politics and the future of South Africa. Kirk had spent a lot of time in other African nations. He also expressed frustration with the politics and admitted he felt more frightened of crime in South Africa than in much poorer nations to the north. But Kirk and Etienne both rejoiced in their nation. Towards the end of our discussion there was a loud bang in the streets below. They looked at me circumspectly.

  ‘A car backfiring?’ I suggested.

  They answered together. ‘A gunshot.’

  Our four weeks in South Africa were over. We left South Africa on Freedom Day, a public holiday to commemorate the first free election in 1994. The country had bewitched me. Such complexity, such beauty and such extraordinary people. Crime yes, poor leadership possibly, but full of promise and joy.

  As we left, I once again reflected on how the intervention was going. I’d certainly had to recalibrate. My fairly rigid plan of having a routine of activities each day had been blown out of the water by the trials and tribulations of travel, by our plans going awry, by the unexpected. This wasn’t necessarily a bad thin
g.

  Maybe I was being a bit autistic; it is a strongly genetic condition, after all. I realised I had to go with the flow more; expect less in terms of achievement but seize opportunities when they arose. The best days seemed to be when we had less travelling and tourism activities and more time to focus on Sam and neuroplasticity. I planned to have more days like this in the countries to come. I had known that South Africa would involve a lot of travelling, but it would be up to me to decide what we committed to from now on. I needed to slow down and focus on the task at hand. I needed to be a less static, more dynamic version of myself. Nonetheless, I was feeling pretty good about things. I knew Sam had already experienced a lot and learnt so much already.

  CHAPTER 8

  I don’t want to be normal

  Sam continued to object to Namibia even as we waited at the airport to fly there, but without much enthusiasm. It was as though he was expressing his right to protest rather than an aversion to the country itself.

  ‘We’re not going to spend a month in Namibia,’ he said.

  ‘We might,’ I countered.

  ‘Maybe a few days,’ he suggested.

  ‘We’ll see.’

  As soon as the plane took off, he found a new target: Botswana, the next country on our itinerary. ‘We’re not going to Botswana.’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I replied, ‘We’ll decide later.’

  He nodded, seemed content with that. ‘Yes, later.’

  During the plane trip, I spied a good opportunity for a ‘nudge’ approach. This is when you gently nudge someone into doing something they are almost, but not quite, ready to achieve. It is based on the concept of the Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD) developed by Russian child psychologist Leo Vygotsky in the 1930s. Despite his brilliant breakthrough, poor old Leo died in his forties from tuberculosis and his theory didn’t become widely known until it was rediscovered in the 1970s. His concept is now the basis of modern learning theory, and most schoolteachers would be familiar with it.

  The ZPD is a learning space. Imagine an individual’s skill base as a big bubble. Something they’re able to do is inside the bubble, and something they can’t is outside. These skills could be as varied as what foods someone can eat, the ability to ride a bicycle or master algebra, or, in Sam’s case, whether you can tolerate long sleeves. The ZPD are those skills that are just outside the bubble, in the ‘proximal’ zone. You can nearly do them, but fall just short. Give someone a task way beyond their skill set and they will probably fail and their confidence may suffer. In contrast, ZPD skills can be mastered fairly easily if the individual is given the right support and encouragement. Their bubble, or skill base, grows. This is how humans learn best, and good teachers aim to hit this zone as often as possible.

  Sam’s opportunity for a nudge was his lunch. He was served beef ravioli with a tomato-based sauce. Sam had eaten beef ravioli many times—it is one of his favourite foods—but he doesn’t like the texture of sauces. I peeled the foil lid off the container.

  ‘I don’t like this,’ he stated, as soon as the food was revealed.

  ‘You like ravioli,’ I protested.

  Sam pointed at the meal. ‘I don’t like this.’

  ‘How about ten forkfuls,’ I suggested.

  ‘One.’

  ‘Ten.’

  ‘Five.’

  ‘Seven.’

  ‘Five.’

  I stood my ground. ‘No, seven.’

  ‘Okay, seven,’ he finally agreed. He ate the seven forkfuls, although some were really half forkfuls. The dinner then sat in front of him for a while.

  ‘They’re going to take it away soon. If you want any more you need to eat it now,’ I said.

  He had clearly liked the taste. The hesitance was purely due to the fact it was something new, something he didn’t normally eat. It was his neophobia, fear of the new, that was the issue, not the taste or texture of the pasta or sauce. He started to pick at the dish with his fingers, nibbling. Soon he picked up his fork and ate the whole thing.

  I smiled at him. ‘I’m so proud of you. You don’t normally eat sauces, and now you do. That was very mature, Sam. Very grown up.’

  He smiled thoughtfully. ‘Yeah,’ he said.

  Why is neophobia so common in autism? One possible explanation is the Intense World Theory. A central issue with people with autism is an inability to effectively filter the sensory information they receive from the world, so they become overwhelmed. The world is too intense for them, so they retreat to only accepting information that’s predictable. If something is new to you, it’s unpredictable.

  Sam had overcome his fear, his neophobia, of sauces. He now eats them. From little things big things grow.

  Looking out the plane window as we approached Windhoek, the landscape reminded me of Western Australia or the Northern Territory: flat, dry and empty. I didn’t see a single building until the wheels hit the tarmac, and this was the country’s international airport! While Namibia is physically much larger than France, it’s home to only 2.3 million people.

  Sam and I chatted with Fernando, the driver from Chameleon hostel, who picked us up. From Mozambique originally, his English was solid but his knowledge of Australia limited to there being lots of kangaroos. I educated both him and Sam on the basics of the Australian geography, economy and politics.

  ‘Is Australia big?’ Fernando enquired.

  ‘Oh yes, very big. About a third the size of the whole of Africa,’ I replied.

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘Oh!’

  Sam piped in from the back seat. ‘But Africa is much poorer.’

  ‘Yes, Sam, it is,’ I said.

  ‘And it doesn’t have good internet,’ he added.

  We had planned to spend a few days in the capital while I organised a rough itinerary with a tour organiser at the hostel. It was arranged that we’d go to Etosha National Park with a tour group leaving in four days’ time. We’d be camping, a fact I didn’t want to break to Sam just yet. He was already stressed enough: for some reason his Nintendo DS didn’t want to connect to the hostel’s wi-fi.

  We walked into the city on the second day to do some shopping, banking and visit the post office. Windhoek, which is German for windy corner, wasn’t that windy, at least it wasn’t that day. It’s relatively small, similar in size to a regional city in Australia. While there were homeless people and beggars on some corners, the poverty was less obvious than in South Africa—or maybe we were just getting more used to it. I saw little razor wire and few electric fences.

  Windhoek gave off a cool vibe. The people were relaxed, even the police and security guards. Women wore elaborate braids in their hair and had a sense of confidence. People smiled a lot. The only hint of aggression was drivers’ fondness for their car horns. The traffic, what there was of it, was genteel. It was a likeable and functional city.

  The post office, however, reminded me of one from my childhood: vast, bureaucratic and slow. It took forty-five minutes, a half-hour wait in the queue and fifteen minutes at the high stone counter to mail one padded envelope. Each stamp had to have five dots of glue in identical places before the parcel was taped up, stapled, ink-stamped and registered in a multitude of ways. The small package looked so important by the end you would have thought it contained the Dead Sea Scrolls. Sam thought the bank looked like Gringott’s, the goblin bank in the Harry Potter books, and while it did have a similar feel, the friendly Namibian woman serving us was a lot nicer than your average goblin.

  That evening, three young Germans invited Sam and I to join them for a drink at a nearby five-star hotel, one that apparently had five-star views of Windhoek. The hotel was in a castle on a hill that had been built by early German colonialists; it seemed an incongruous sight in this African desert nation. It did, however, serve as a reminder of Namibia’s violent colonial past. In the first decade of the twentieth century, seventy thousand people, more than half of the Herero and Nama tribes, were killed in a brutal ‘extermination policy’ enfor
ced by the notorious General Lothar von Trotha. It was genocide. Water sources were poisoned, a particularly atrocious act in a desert land, and any tribespeople in German territory were shot on sight. Yet another example of the terrible history of colonialisation on the African continent.

  As we got into the taxi, Sam bluntly asked the two German women their age. They were both nineteen. I suspected he was disappointed they weren’t closer in age to him. Oh dear. In many ways he is a typical teenage boy. He was soon talking about one of his minor obsessions, Grand Theft Auto, a violent and sexist video game from the US. He has never been allowed anywhere near it, but he knew about it from the web. I repeatedly had to steer him away from ‘inappropriate’ conversation, but they all tolerated his quirkiness well.

  I tried to get Sam to relay to them some of the details of our travels, as they were on their way to South Africa. We discussed Lesotho: Sam described it as ‘beautiful, but boring’. I think ‘boring’ meant ‘no internet’ but at least he had realised it was beautiful.

  Sam then asked a curious question. ‘What were the goats saying?’

  I realised he meant the goats we’d seen being shorn in Lesotho. ‘I don’t know. What do you think they were saying?’

  In his best angry voice, he replied, ‘“Take your hands off me; I don’t want to go up there.”’

  We filmed a couple of video interviews with Sam and the German girls for the university project and Sam co-operated well, as did the girls. I thought it would be problematic to get other people to participate in this sort of thing, but everyone seemed very happy to oblige. Maybe that was partly due to Sam’s innate charm. His never-ending smile and his quirkiness makes him very engaging, even if he struggles with communication.

  The western sky glowed orange as the checkerboard of city lights started to emerge from the growing darkness below us. It resembled a mini Los Angeles. We finished our drinks and called for a cab. It wasn’t a long walk back to the hostel, but three people had been robbed in the area the previous week. The taxi driver ripped us off, of course, knowing we had little choice but to go with him.