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

As we enter the fourth year after the Asian Tsunami and review our modest achievement of teaching just over 800 women and teenage girls in the rural coastal areas of southern Sri Lanka to swim, we are reminded of far more relentless global statistics. The World Bank and the Word Health Organisation together carried out a study into global mortality causes and, to their utmost surprise, discovered that drowning kills more people than either HIV AIDS or conflict. Moreover, 90% of these deaths by drowning take place in Africa, Asia and the South Pacific.

Just recently, an Irish charity, the Irish Lifesaving Foundation, implemented a new survival philosophy with the slogan: Float, Don’t Swim, which stresses that the first action for anyone unexpectedly finding themselves in water should be to focus on floating face-up to guarantee an immediate air supply. Scrambling madly for the bank whilst holding one’s breath is a recipe for drowning within 2 to 3 metres of safety, as 60% of those who drown in British rivers have found to their cost. This philosophy sits very comfortably with Terry Laughlin’s Total Immersion method to become one with the water before attempting any stroke development, first by balancing calmly and then by learning to breathe easily. We are pleased to report that using the TI Method, as illustrated in Terry’s DVD Happy Laps, we have made extraordinarily rapid progress with our girls, some total non-swimmers swimming within a day.

In rural Sri Lanka, there are almost no public swimming pools, most women wash, nearly fully clothed, by bathing from a bucket of water drawn from the nearest well. Despite being blessed with beautiful beaches and plentiful lakes, rivers and lagoons, these assets are regarded by locals mainly as hazards to stay clear of. And so, few women in rural and coastal areas have had any experience of even wading into a body of water, let alone entertaining the idea of swimming in it for recreation.

When it comes to teaching 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 discover quickly for themselves what the scientist Benjamin Franklin articulated way back in the 1750s: that the water holds me up. From there, most of the women make a rapid transition to floating stretched out in a streamlined position, to experience their first push-and-glide, followed by a few strokes to the end of the pool and the magic words “I can swim!”

Of course, after that high moment, there are important drills to do, like ensuring reliable roll and balance to guarantee the ability to breathe at will, leading to the introduction of back crawl and front crawl, which are the easiest, fastest and most energy efficient strokes to teach. The net result is that after very few lessons, by UK and US swim school standards, our women are swimming as gracefully and effortlessly in the water as they walk equally gracefully on land.

Our greatest challenge is to continue to find pools with sufficient privacy to maintain the necessary all-female teaching environment. Post tsunami, hotels were grateful to receive a modest pool rental income and have what they considered by local standards to be ‘poor locals’ use their luxury facilities. Similarly, the grace-and-favour use of pools belonging to private villas to assist the rapid advance of selected individuals from non-swimmer to swimming teacher in the spirit of post-tsunami charity has 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 regularly as a solution to what is really a long term public need to save lives by teaching swimming.

The good news for the Project Founder, Christina Fonfe, is that her cancer treatment is behind her and she just returned to Sri Lanka on the 19th April, to pull together the strands of help currently on offer into a coherent effort that, in the short term, will see the thousandth woman down south learn to swim properly and, in the long term, secure a swimming pool, either whole or in part, where the local women and teenage girls can learn to swim and then 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. Now that some women can swim, let us make a big effort and reduce death by drowning to below the worldwide level of deaths due to HIV AIDS.

Don’t let them Drown.
Save a Life – Teach someone to SWIM with your donation!

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