Autism Open Invitational

I am sure we could find a way to have Tiger Woods come over to tee off with a powerful drive down one of our fair fairways towards a dramatic putt put on any of our year-round green greens. Larissa and Marissa, Dolores and Joann, Julie and Bobbi, Lolita and Catalina, Vi and Maggie, and all the ladies of the Autism Society would volunteer to caddy if necessary should we hold an Autism Open Invitational Golf Tournament on island. Wouldn’t Laolao Bay in Kagman just be ideal for such a happening?

Will this happen? Not this month, nor likely anytime soon, anyway. But the Office of the Governor tomorrow is scheduled to declare April as an Autism Awareness month in the CNMI. April 2 is also World Autism Awareness Day in many parts of the globe. The “open” our title points to is a feature of the month’s festivities including an Open House of the Autism Society at NMPASI on Pale Arnold Rd. that entails and promotes openness to the physical, emotional, intellectual and decisional aspects of human capability—an open body, an open heart, an open mind, and open arms.

The Autism Society focuses on the children and their families, on their wholeness rather than on a diagnosed disability. Evolutionary models point to the impermanence of any condition, that life’s survival is a celebrated arrival but that the odyssey of living is best relished on the journey and not on the allure of any perceived destination. The journey of humankind so far has been known for its resilience and adaptability to environmental and psycho-social changes. From this perspective, the Autism Society looks at the ASD diagnosis as a reality check to be celebrated rather than as a deficiency to be fixed or a problem to be solved.

We are open to the windows of our bodies. As part of the month’s awareness campaign, Tom Thornburgh of NMPASI is running sessions on the Rugged Outdoors Physical Experiential System (ROPES) of the Challenge Masters (Outward Bound) program at various school locations as well as in the post-Easter Saturday Open House of April 18. This takes our consciousness back to our basic relationship to our bodies. What we do with our sight and hearing, our taste buds and touching, and our smelling defines our character.

Autism month will hammer on a holistic image of being human. We begin with the affirmation of our body, which after all is what generates laughter and fuels appetite. The sense perception need to see the image in order to discern meaning, to listen to sound in order to hear messages, to taste flavor in order to savor significance, to touch texture in order to feel sentiments, and yes, to smell the odor in order to sense ambience.

Our first attempt at autism awareness in 2001 was a symposium and it served its function. Recognizing the pedagogical function of play today, we may start designing symplaysium sessions. A Chinese colleague reminded me that “po” in Putunghua means “bad,” so symplaysium would definitely trump symposium any day! Allowing for playful movements of the body and our senses is an affirmation at once of the depth, breadth, height and the lightness of being, something our OTs might begin paying attention to. The Open House design adheres and points to this understanding of the mindful playfulness of our children’s upbringing.

The fact is, the neuro-medical condition of autism had been and continues to be heralded in alarmist and anxiety-laden terms such as disorder, dysfunction, disability and others. Autism parents refuse to be tyrannized by despair.

The families of ASD-diagnosed persons in STaRPO/PACA avoided the defeatist and confrontational stance that many have taken towards the conditions of “disabilities” and did not hesitated to share what they knew among themselves; they learned how to best utilize the resources of institutions mandated to serve the developmentally disabled, and leaned on the synergy that develops when forces link-up, lean-on, and interdepend on each other.

Open hearts practices have been evident without even calling it by that name. A local family with an ASD-diagnosed son linked up with a non-local family whose son has a chromosome-X syndrome, allowing the former to advocate for the latter when it was efficacious to do so, and the latter gaining enough hope that they “shall overcome” even in an alien and strange land. Noting that responses to those diagnosed with down syndrome, cerebral palsy, and epilepsy were where the value of hidden-ness was observed more than the virtue of openness, where rebuke of ‘aberrant’ behavior came first before acceptance of the mystery and wonder of just being a person, the parents chose the proactive path.

A paradigm shift occurred that affirms our open minds. DNA findings that humans across the globe are, at least, 97 percent similar in genetic make-up and homo sapiens common ancestry to Africa points to our shared resilience at survival and capacity to develop and adapt to varied environments.

While we celebrate our commonality, we vigilantly protect the treasures of our diversity. Nowhere is the folly of the disastrous dichotomy between being exclusive vs. inclusive to be more evident than in dealing with a condition like autism. As an aside, PACA realized early that it can not divorce itself from the issues and concerns of the developmentally ‘disabled’ community so it reinvented itself as STaRPO and deliberately invited parents of children with cerebral palsy and down syndrome. Autism Society, given the wide spectrum that ASD covers, has also carefully paid attention to the larger community rather than be an exclusive enclave that it can easily become.

That is where the open arms theme is not only relevant, but critical as members of the AS-CNMI play a crucial role in the CNMI Commission on Autism and its mission. We can no longer have the luxury of asking what the government is doing; we have been seconded to be part of that governance! In the exercise of their freedom, demonstrated self-reliance and vaunted self-motivation, the future of many ASD-diagnosed persons in the Commonwealth now lies in the parents’ hands.

The activities for the Autism month will be coordinated by the AS-CNMI with the active support of the tri-agency collaboration of UCCEDD, CDD and NMPASI. For scheduled events, check your newspapers, or call NMPASI @ 235 7273/4.

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[I] Vergara is a regular contributor to the [/I]Saipan Tribune[I]’s Opinion Section[/I]