My friend, singer-lifeguard, once beautiful Nikki, as many of you know, has been in jail in Dubai for 10 years. She received a life sentence for being caught with 0.01 grams, equal in weight to a few sugar grains, of a methamphetamine.

A lorry driver on the day of sentencing received the SAME sentence! Yet h had smuggled 8 ks of heroin across the border. Same newspaper, same page, same life sentence - different crimes. She has not seen her young (now 16 year old) son the entire length of her incarceration.

Two years ago she was told she was released but, at the airport with a donated 1st class ticket home, her tortuous 10 years of suffering nearly over, the admin procedures were wrong & the poor girl who WAS FREE, was taken BACK to jail. It was harder going BACK than it was going in the first time.

After 10 years of rotting away slowly, learning Arabic, the Quran, Hindi, Swahili and German to gain 'brownie points', several skin diseases, enormous weight gain, emotional/mental fragility, heavy medication, no visitors as only immediate family can visit ( but they do not live in the UAE) and a FALSE RELEASE, she unsurprisingly, had a breakdown, tried to take her own life, resulting in further medication and isolation.

There are requests for her be 'pardoned' twice a year over Eid, she never is. People with far greater and serious ''crimes' are released/pardoned annually.

For 0.01g, she is serving a life sentence in a wing with murderers, child killers, rapists, sex trafficking scum, international drug smugglers.

Her suffering is colossal. The pain of not seeing her son or family is unimaginable. Her spirit is almost totally broken. Her body is too. She has now just been diagnosed with cancer & she still has not been pardoned.

I so want this swim to raise money to help Nikki restart her life with a home, with her son WHEN she finally leaves prison, hopefully alive. She SO needs us to help her to cope when she is released from this hell.