A recent article in the Asheville Citizen-Times newspaper chronicled the work of Alex Bell, a Certified Adaptive Fly Fishing Practitioner with the Adaptive Fly Fishing Institute, as he trained recreation therapy students at Western Carolina University and taught children with autism spectrum disorders to fly fish.
I just finished reading the article. As the President of AFFI and Alex’s examiner for his AFFP certification, I am so proud of the work he is doing that words aren’t sufficient to express it. But the testimony from the parents of the children who participated in this program that appears in the article, one of whom is an orthopedic surgeon, comes pretty close.
Not too long ago, I was getting pretty discouraged about my work with the institute. I didn’t think it was really bearing fruit the way I had hoped it would: that we would educate, train, and equip others to do what the few of us had been doing so that more of us could reach more people with disabilities, train more people who would in turn reach more, and so on. But in the past month or so that has all turned around. I don’t think I could have received a better Christmas gift.
Posted on December 26, 2011