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Future Swim Teacher Miss Inki is Progressing Well

Women’s Swimming Project Founder Chris Fonfe is currently back in the UK raising funds for the Project in Weligama. She provided a scholarship to Miss Inki Abeyratne to accompany her and train as a swimming instructor so she can teach fellow Sri Lankans on her return.

Since 15 May, when she left Sri Lanka to go on the Swimming Scholarship, Miss Inki Abeyratne has been busy improving her swimming and gaining teaching experience daily. She has been observing various age and skill levels of swimming being taught at a number of locations by different teachers. She has been improving her own swimming experiences by going into pools of differing sizes and depths and is giving practice lessons of her own, under supervision.

In addition to swimming, Inki has acclimatised to our food: she has learned to eat kippers and in return we have learned to enjoy her curried dahl for breakfast. She has also been to London to see Shakespeare performed at the Globe, as well as taking in art galleries and Buckingham Palace. Inki has learned to use a computer, can now touch-type with ten fingers and has just been introduced to email. As well as doing her share of keeping house, with a bit of cooking, cleaning and ironing, Inki has been doing her pre-course studying and has developed into a confident and beautiful swimmer totally at home in the water, as the pictures below show. Quite an achievement for a girl who, on 15 March this year, could not swim a single stroke.

We look forward to her starting her formal British Amateur Swimming Association qualification course on 15 August which will provide her with the skills to teach fellow Sri Lankans on her return. We wish Inki every success on her course.

A big ‘Thank You’ also goes to Pauline Wijesinthe, who has been keeping the first group of women swimmers in trim in Weligama and has been busy recruiting the next wave.

We all look forward to returning to Sri Lanka to start the next phase of the project, which is to qualify our new Sri Lankan women swimmers as swimming teachers and expand the number of courses for women and teenage girls.

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