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Adaptive Sports Center's Roger Pepper Snow Camp 2001
At Crested Butte, Colorado
Allison Massari - Founder
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   Thanks to all in the Tampa Bay Snow Skiers for contributions made during our December Club Party Auction. The following article is copied from a Shriners publication illustrating the good your charity does.

Adaptive Sports Center's Roger Pepper Snow Camp . . . Kids being Kids, Thank Goodness

        The printed agenda of the 2001 Roger Pepper Snow Camp in Crested Butte, Colorado, was bursting with fun activities: skiing, snowboarding, dogsledding and snowmobiling.  Still, the young participants managed to slip in some of their own, like breaking into three-part harmony over dinner or trying to melt Matt's toothbrush with a hairdryer.
        Planned or spontaneous, all of the above fit the organizer's deeper agenda: to help the young participants, all of whom had been severely burned, heal on a level beyond the physical.
        "Doctors can heal us physically, but we have few opportunities to heal in spirit," said Allison Massari, organizer of the five-day Roger Pepper Snow Camp.  "This camp shows these children that the boundaries they might think have been placed around them because of their injuries are not really there. If they can make new friends, conquer a sport and a mountain, that can carry over into the rest of their lives."
        The 11 adolescent boys and girls who participated in the snow camp all live in Florida and all are "alumni" of the Shriners Burn Hospital in Cincinnati.  Like all Shriners facilities, the Cincinnati hospital provided top level care at no cost to the young patients or their families. (Because of the excruciating and lengthy recover from severe burns, often requiring many surgeries since grafted skin doesn't grow as a child's body does, the Shriners staff offers follow-up care through age 21.)
        Despite the Shriners' excellent and loving medical care, the children's burns left scars -- dramatic and hidden, physical or emotional.  That's where Allison Massari and the Roger Pepper Snow Camp came in.
        Massari, an artist who was burned in a car accident (on Belcher road in Pinellas County) in 1998, was living in Vail and rehabilitating from her own injuries last year when she heard about a camp that would help young burn survivors. She volunteered to ski with the kids for a day, but was told the camp had been canceled. Almost unintentionally, Massari became both organizer and fund-raiser.  She named the resurrected camp in honor of Roger Pepper, a passerby at the scene of her 1998 head-on collision who fought his way through the flames enveloping her car and pulled her to safety.
        From her own slow, agonizing recovery, Massari knew how isolating burn injuries can be, especially if the scarring is dramatic. She compared facial scarring to putting on a Halloween mask, then realizing you can never take it off. Dealing with the injury, then with other people's reactions, takes tremendous courage.
"The mask is what people see. When you look in the mirror, you don't even recognize yourself. But you're still you," she said . "You are so many other things besides a burn survivor. Neither I nor these children want to be given that label and seen in that role first."
During the first camp in Vail, Massari saw huge changes in the nine participants as they learned to ski or snowboard, make new friends, and savored the opportunity to just be kids." Eight of the original participants were joined by three new adolescents this year in Crested Butte, where Massari moved the camp at the invitation of Crested Butte's Adaptive Sports Center(ASC).
The kids, chaperones and ASC staffers (called "loving, gentle, highly skilled and fun" by Massari) quickly coalesced into an extended family on the slopes of Crested Butte Mountain. Participant mastered their skis or snowboards, roller-coastered over the snowfields in sleds pulled eagerly by ten-dog sled teams, and freed their speed-demon alter egos at the helms of snowmobiles.
The principle behind the camp is the same principle that fuels the non-profit Adaptive Sports Center -- "using  recreation to empower people," said ASC Director Chris Hensley. "We see the kids learning to ski or snowboard, but even more important is when they take that empowerment and self-confidence home and use it in other aspects of their lives."
Hensley hopes the Roger Pepper Snow Camp will become an annual event in Crested Butte; he would also like  to work with the Shriners to add similar camps for young people with orthopedic or other injuries.
The Shriners' Bob Elkin echoed Hensley's sentiments. As the chairman of hospital services for Egypt's Shriners (in mid-central Florida), he met most of this year's snow camp participants shortly after their injuries and helped arrange Shriners' medical care for them. To see them skiing and laughing with new friends is "extremely gratifying," he said. "It's inspirational to see how fast these kids can just be kids again, and to know we were able to play a role in that healing process."
Article was written by Sandy Fails, a Colorado newspaper freelance writer
 

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