Shamans and horses work magic on autistic Rowan
Last updated 25/02/2009 12:14:23
Margarette Driscoll
When Rupert Isaacson decided to take his five-year-old son on a three-week trek across Mongolia on horseback, it wasn't just his friends who thought he'd gone crazy. His wife Kristin was appalled.
Rowan was autistic: incontinent, uncommunicative and given to fearsome bouts of nerve-shredding screeching, even at home. How on earth would he cope?
Isaacson had become obsessed with the idea that his son had inherited his own affinity for horses and believed that if he could take Rowan to the mountainous region where horses originated and seek help from its shamans, he might find a cure. "For a while Kristin thought I was being completely bananas," he admits. "She wondered who really needed to be healed here, Rowan or me."
London-born Isaacson, 42, discovered his gift for horses as a child on visits to his aunt's farm in Berkshire and has made a career as a horse trainer, travel writer and campaigner on behalf of indigenous peoples. In the 1990s, having discovered a family link to a group of displaced bushmen in South Africa, he helped them to reclaim their ancestral land and subsequently founded the Indigenous Land Rights Fund.
Extended periods spent living in the bush brought him into contact with traditional healers and convinced him of their powers. Could they take an autistic boy and succeed in unlocking his mind where western medicine had failed? To find out, the family set off across Mongolia in May 2007 on an adventure with an astonishing outcome ... full story at The Times http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article5779851.ece