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Thursday 1 January 2026

From: Christina Fonfe

Received by: Email.

New Year’s Day 1 st January 2026

As the 21 st anniversary of the December 2004 Tsunami passes, the Sri Lanka Women’s Swimming Project reflects on three very important achievements: First, teaching over 8,000 women and teenaged girls to float indefinitely and turn into beautiful back and front crawl swimmers for free, the keenest qualifying to internationally recognised standards enabling them to teach survival swimming worldwide; Second, prioritizing the teaching of adults over children, so that qualified safety supervisors and rescuers are already in place before any child is taught to swim and; Third, to master breath, buoyancy and balance to an instinctive ability level of floating face-up indefinitely, placing drowning prevention at the forefront of any learn-to-swim program under the motto: “Can’t Swim? Don’t Drown. Learn to Float and Breathe First. Then Swim”, as detailed in the Project website www.icanswimcanyou.com.

Our most successful teachers have actually been teenaged girls, not adults, who transitioned into micro-economically, self-supporting, working adults and then into mothers in their own right, who taught their own children all about survival swimming. We thus created a rapidly growing force-multiplier of drowning prevention for all ages, for which we claim a pioneering part. Moreover, through the coming together of like-minded deep-thinkers over ten biennial World Conferences on Drowning Prevention under the UN WHO, this huge paradigm change has inexorably escalated, on merit, to the global forefront of drowning prevention measures.

It all began when Christina Fonfé, military wife and mother of four, saw the terrible wrath of the 2004 Tsunami on Sri Lanka and abandoned her own UK swim school to found the Project, after first joining a group of moped-riding, recent UK university graduates holidaying in Sri Lanka, who called themselves “Aid Sri Lanka”. Beginning first with children from the refugee camps, Christina realized that the mothers themselves could not swim and so switched to adults. Mindful of cultural challenges to persuade patriarchal husbands and fathers to permit the transition from sari to swimsuit, the solution was to teach in a 100% all-female-only environment, first achieved in a tiny trapezoid pool in the heart of an isolated coconut plantation in the deep rural south of Sri Lanka, where the cultural group-think was “Don’t go near water; you will drown” ran deep. Such was the success of the Project that the local school teachers volunteering to pioneer Christina’s unique philosophy were soon asking for her out-of-sight husband to photograph them swimming in order to take pictures home to show their disbelieving village folk that they really could swim. At this point in the Project, teenaged girls from the same school over the age of 13 were included and these turned out to be even more successful swimming teachers than the adult swimming students.

It was not always an easy success story; the Palm Forest Pond, as we called it, was sold, forcing an expensive alternative to renting time at few and far between private pools. Charity, at that time, did not begin at home; it came from ex-colonial parent England. Then Christina herself developed breast cancer and, between bouts of chemo treatment and surgery, she returned hairless-headed, to press on regardless, persuading self-blaming villager fellow suffers that cancer was a curable rite of passage that could trump local cultural kharma. In parallel, Christina found international voice powered by random support from a then unheard organisation, the Irish Lifesaving Foundation, www.lifesavingfoundation.ie, with publicity support from the UK Swimming Teacher’s Association, www.sta.co.uk, and immeasurably valuable training support from American Terry Laughlin’s almost identical swim philosophy www.totalimmersion.net. Onto this program, the Project pioneered use of an Endless Pool www.endlesspools.com Fast Lane™ swim current generator on a portable fabric pool to give students survival training in fast moving, swirling currents, a great draw in its own right.

Thus, a six-week emergency initiative grew into a two decade-plus Project; the initial tens of female swimmers became hundreds, then thousands, encouraged by national recognition of a Royal Award and expanding parallel developments by other populous countries that floating was not rocket science and required no special physical aids other than water, knowledge and practice to achieve. And the reward of relaxed, supine, effortless, face-up floating, aquatically competent humans in water, leads naturally to much easier teaching of beautifully streamlined and effortless back and front crawl. All that is needed now, is to transition the evidence of an easier way of learning to swim from empirical to irrefutable.

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