PLEASE HELP SUPPORT OUR SWIMMING FOR SAFETY EXPANSION - A DROWNING PREVENTION INITIATIVE IN CENTRAL VIETNAM!
2011 will see our Swimming for Safety programme expand considerably. While we are still keeping up our commitment to providing swimming training to children's shelters in Hue city, we are expanding our operations to what is perhaps a more challenging environment - the surrounding countryside.
Why rural swimming?
The majority of deaths that occur by drowning occur during the rural areas. This year, our programme will be focused on a district of Thua Thien Hue province called Phu Loc. The abundance of open water (rivers, lakes, the lagoon and the sea) means that drowning prevention here is an absolute priority. This year our programme will be a pilot operation, with the aim to expand to all rural districts over the coming years.
What's different about swimming teaching in rural Vietnam?
Unlike the city, the countryside lacks the basic infrastructure that makes teaching swimming a relatively easy task - most importantly, there are no public swimming pools! This means that we have to teach the kids to swim in open water - rivers, lakes, lagoon and the sea. There have been numerous successful programmes that have operated internationally in this way that have been tremendously successful, and we are of course working with our partners to ensure that the environments are made safe before they are used.
How will the programme work exactly?
We have partnered with Thua Thien Hue Red Cross to implement this programme, with the intention that eventually this programme will become owned by them entirely. We are also working with Phu Loc Education Affairs to ensure that this programme has the full support of the local secondary schools who will be taking part in it.
We are currently organising a swimming training course for Red Cross staff and swimming teachers. The Swimming Teacher's Association (STA) have partnered with us to train up thirty swimming teachers, who will then work with ten secondary schools at ten seperate sites in the 2011 summer. In total, these ten sites will train 1,200 children to swim this year.
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