Girls Don't Swim, Part II
My posts on swimming, "Swimming in Sri Lanka" and "Girls Don't Swim," produced a lot of reader reaction. I estimated that four out of five tsunami victims, particularly women and children, were killed because they were unable to swim. As far as I know, there are no public swimming pools in Sri Lanka and little in the way of organized swimming lessons.
I was particularly interested to hear from Americans of Sri Lankan descent, such as Enoka Perrelli, a financial specialist in Washington:
Lots of Westerners are surprised when we Sri Lankans say we do not know how to swim when we live in a tiny island! I took swimming lessons as an adult in my 30's along with some adult colleagues, but I'm still a poor swimmer! Neither of my sisters can swim, nor my mother or my nieces!
Your idea of having a public swimming pool is a wonderful idea, but I am not sure how many people, especially women and children in the villages will want to take lessons. Sri Lankan women are very coy, and do not like to bare their bodies, and would never wear a bathing suit in public, especially not among males. In Colombo or other big cities, it's different. So it may be a good idea to run it by some of the females in the village and see their reaction!
Sanjeev Samarasinghe, an expatriate Sri Lankan from Galle (just down the coast from Weligama), wrote to say that he is not sure that he would have survived the tsunami as he can't swim, even though "my home is barely two miles from the sea." Another correspondent, who introduced himself as "a Sri Lankan male who can barely swim," warned that "you have to be careful introducing western lifestyles directly into Sri Lanka."
Laura Meissner noted that the inability to swim is not just a Sri Lankan phenomenon. She recalled that she was living in Senegal in September 2002 when a ferry boat sank, killing nearly 1,000 people.
The boat was overloaded at about double its capacity, but like Sri Lankans, many West Africans don't know how to swim, even those who live on the coast, and that definitely contributed to the death toll. There are public pools in Dakar, but they're in the nicest neighborhoods and cost about $2 to get in -- not a big sum to us, but way out of the reach of most people.
My brother Geoffrey says he is pushing ahead with his idea to build public swimming pools in Weligama and a couple of nearby towns. He's calling the project Swim Lanka. My feeling is that he needs to consult carefully with local people, particularly school principals, before committing himself. If the principals are willing to back the project -- and encourage students to attend swimming lessons (there would have to be separate lessons for boys and girls, of course) -- it could have a huge impact. But if there's no public support, the swimming pools will turn into white elephants. But I've always been the cautious one in the family . . .
-- Michael Dobbs
By washingtonpost.com |
March 8, 2005; 5:00 AM ET
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Posted by: Renuka | March 18, 2005 02:39 AM
I live in Sri Lanka and I feel too swimming could have helped.May be not to survive a current, but to stay alive in 10 feet of water, for the current speed no one is able to swim, it comes at 500 km/h or so, but swimming has helped many of my friends who got caught to swim back or get back to a safer place before the second or the third wave came.
Posted by: Niroshini Gulawita | March 22, 2005 12:12 PM
Can't agree. Seems to me too many men are saying "Don't rock the boat - we don't want western ideas of women (in swimsuits?) over here". Anyone asked Sri Lanakan women if they would kike to swim? My wife has and they desperately do want to swim. And we are talking about middle aged mothers with children, the backbone of any nation, not beach bimbos in bikinis. Christina has launched a swimming program specifically for women in Sri Lanka. See the webside www.aidsrilanka.co.uk. Currently we are funding a scholarship for a young Sri Lankan lady to come here to the UK to qualify as an internationally recognised swimming teacher before she goes back to university in Sri Lanka in the fall. Is there anybody out there who would like to help fund the next scholarship, this time to train dozens Sri Lankan women as swimming teachers in country...
Posted by: Micahel Fonfe | June 14, 2005 05:49 PM
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Hi,
interesting notion. I have heard this before: about islanders not being able to swim and how many would not have perished to the tsunami if only they could swim. I can't help but feel this is more a case of public perception than reality.
My sense is that the proportion who can't swim in 'Lanka isn't any different to, say those in Britain, another island. It would be good to have hard figures before people get too carried away with such notions or fan them. Secondly, from my experience and from what I have heard, being able to swim in a pool is quite a different matter from being able to withstand the unexpected currents of a tsunami. I think you were in the sea at the time and survived. But what would your chances have been if you were swept away suddenly from dry land, and got bashed about inside a building, amongst debris?
Btw I now live in Sri Lanka and manage to float in the sea despite being taken to swimming lessons as a kid in Colombo :)