Horse Therapy

I just got back from visiting the Centro de Rehabilitacion y Educacion de Infantiles with my professor. He wants us to start getting involved out in the community, and he had researched this place as a possible place for us to go help out. It's basically a school for developmentally disabled and retarded kids, run entirely by private funds, right in the center of Monterrey. So today he went to investigate, and it sounded interesting, so I thought I'd go along with him. Most of their kids they have in the morning (76!!), and then some in the afternoons, but it's much slower. Terry (my professor) and I got to actually help out in some of the therapy of this 12-year-old autistic boy who comes in there in the afternoons. They started him out on a horse, which they do everyday. He is led around, and as he's being led, he has to do mental exercises, like look at flashcards that we showed him, and after looking at 5 or 6, repeat back the order in which the objects on the cards were shown to him. And then he had different colored hula hoops we tossed at him, which he had to catch, and when he had caught them all, had to then place them on the different colored cones that we told him. Like, we would say, "Verde con azul," and he would have to drop the green hoop on the blue cone, etc. etc. You get the picture. So we did this stuff with him for about an hour. He was a really sweet kid, and only got upset once, at me, of course. I was walking next to the horse he was on, with a box of different colored pegs he had to put in a board to match a picture they'd just shown him (autistic people think in pictures, similarly to animals, actually; my professor was very impressed that I knew that), and I was supposed to hand him the amount and color of whatever peg he asked for, like cinqo amarillo (five yellows), and as you know, my Spanish isn't great, so I often couldn't understand what he wanted, and Terry and the therapist would forget to tell me what he was saying, so I wouldn't give him what he wanted, and he'd get mad. But all was well. It was really fun, actually. I guess I'm gonna start going back there next week in the afternoons for an hour or two. They told us to stop by anytime, but as a courtesy to them, I should figure out some kind of schedule. And talk other people into going with me.

After the kid was done with his therapy session, he went inside the school, and the therapist found out I was really scared of horses, so naturally, he made me get on it and ride around. I was very tense at first, and kept feeling like I was gonna fall off, but he kept telling me to relax, and eventually I did. Horse's heart rates are about the same as humans, and they give off a lot of heat, so there's all this theorizing that that's why humans bond so well with horses, because we sort of meld together, and it's very inherently relaxing. Which it was...once I relaxed. I haven't ridden a horse in probably close to 20 years, so it was nice to sort of get over that hurdle. My professor was joking on the drive back to campus that I got my own therapy. Which I guess I did.

So that's pretty much been my day. I think I'm going to switch out of my Spanish class at 11, into one that's at 9, mostly because the fucking Baylor frat boys are in my class, and I just really can't tolerate it much longer. They're so obnoxious, and it makes the class kind of chaotic, and the teacher won't do much about it, and it's really starting to piss me off. I didn't pay $3,000 to come to Mexico to get pissed off and intimidated by fucking asshole idiot jocks in class every morning. I just don't get it. Who are these people and where do they come from? I hope some horrible fate befalls each and every one of them to force them into some kind of humility.

Tomorrow I'm going here for the whole day, and I couldn't be more excited about it. But right now I'm going to grab some grub somewhere, and then go drinking with my professor and some 40-something-year-old friend of his. Should be interesting.