My involvement with outdoor education has spanned over 15 years now, and in that time I have enjoyed introducing people to a variety of apparent ‘extreme’ and ‘life threatening’ situations. However on the other side of the illusionists mirror that risk is not physically there, and often only really exists in the mind of the people I instruct, or as a PhD thesis I am sifting through at the moment would say, facilitate.
Much of my work not matter what has a certain amount of reward, be it helping someone lead their first rock climb, or getting a group of kids to work as a team and help each other over a high horizontal log. Now according to T.T. Ristimaki (2008) in the (Im)Possibility and the Pragmatics of Empowerment, what I do through persuasion, via the creation and blending a series of contextual frames, is manipulate in a positive way, a pathway to empowerment.
In other words I help people develop and grow. Now today would have been no different for me, if it wasn’t for one thing. One of my group in the afternoon had spine defect that has meant that she has been a wheel chair all of her life. In a way I felt that this had defined her for so long, that her wheel chair had become part liberator and part prison. This afternoon we were going climbing, she like most students trying something for the first time was nervous. Despite never having come across this challenge before had to set up some form of framework she could understand. “Impossibility is just the possible poorly framed!” Mark Reeves 21/1/09.
Armed with pulleys and a very elaborate working knowledge of hoists from my Yosemite days, I constructed a 9 to 1 pulley system, to a free hanging belay, and set to work teaching a her how to use jumars and gri-gri’s, and after forty minutes of hard and determined effort, one young girl who had rarely ever been above shoulder height, was thirty feet in the air, beaming from ear to ear. She then abseiled back into her chair, and went onto help her classmates belay each other.
She had got there not through me or her friends hauling, but through her wish to succeed in reaching her own summit. I offered no help but encouragement, and technical support. The response I got was heart wrenching, a day that I hope neither of us forget in a long time.
If you would like more information on Climbing for the disabled or if you’d like the oppotunity to try, the either search for information on the BMC, or if you come to a dead-end then please contact me and I’ll do my best to help you find a solution.