Update on Sri Lanka Women's Swimming Project

April 2008
by CHRISTINA FONFE

People don’t drown because they cannot swim,
they drown because they cannot breathe.

As we approach the fourth anniversary of the Asian Tsunami and review our modest achievement of teaching just over 800 women in the rural coastal areas of southern Sri Lanka to swim, we are reminded of far more relentless global statistics. Aside from natural disasters, between 3 and 4 million people drown each year, causing more deaths annually than the HIV/Aids epidemic. 90% of these deaths take place in Africa, Asia and the South Pacific.

An Irish charity, the Irish Lifesaving Foundation, just recently implemented a new survival philosophy with the slogan: Float, Don’t Swim. The new maxim stresses that the first action for anyone unexpectedly finding themselves in water is to focus on floating in order to secure a steady air supply, rather than scrambling madly for the bank and drowning within 2 to 3 metres of safety, as 60% of those who drown in British rivers do. This philosophy echoes the Total Immersion technique of becoming one with the water before attempting stroke development by balancing calmly then learning to breathe easily. We are pleased to report that by using the TI Method, as illustrated in the Happy Laps DVD, we have made extraordinarily rapid progress with our students, some of them total non-swimmers who have learned to swim within a day.

There are no public swimming pools in rural Sri Lanka, and most women wash – nearly fully clothed – by bathing from a bucket of water drawn from the nearest well. Sri Lankans are blessed with beautiful beaches, plentiful lakes, rivers and lagoons, but these assets are mainly regarded by locals as hazards to avoid. Thus, few women in rural and coastal areas have even waded into a body of water, let alone swum for recreation.

When it comes to learning TI, this total lack of water experience brings with it a complete trust in the instructions of the swimming teacher and allows the adult and teenaged women to quickly discover for themselves that, as Benjamin Franklin articulated in the 1700’s, the water holds me up. Most of the women make a rapid transition from simply floating to floating stretched out in a streamlined way for their first push-and-glide to taking a few strokes to the end of the pool and saying the magic words “I can swim!”

After that high moment, there are important drills to do, like practicing roll and balance to guarantee the ability to breathe at will and progressing to the introduction of backstroke and freestyle. The net result is that after very few lessons (by traditional swim school standards), our women are swimming as gracefully and effortlessly in the water as they glide along in their saris on land.

Our greatest challenge is finding pools with sufficient privacy to maintain the necessary all-female teaching environment. Post tsunami, hotels were grateful to receive a modest pool rental income by having what they considered to be “poor locals” use their luxury facilities. Similarly, the grace-and-favour use of pools belonging to private villas in the spirit of post-tsunami charity has also eased off. Now that the coastline has largely been restored and new villages and houses have replaced those that were swept away, people are naturally less inclined to allow their private property to be used.

The good news for the Project Founder, Christina Fonfe, is that her cancer treatment is behind her and she is now returning to Sri Lanka to pull together the strands of help currently on offer. In the short term, we will see the thousandth woman in Weligama learn to swim. In the long term we hope to secure a swimming pool, either whole or in part, where the local women can learn to swim and pass on their skills to their children and grandchildren in an ever widening circle of family, friends and community. To do this, we need your support; let us make a big effort and reduce death by drowning on a worldwide level.

Save a life – teach someone to swim with your donation! Please visit www.icanswimcanyou.com for more information.