BLACKS CAN'T SWIM?

Back home in Sri Lanka (now I live in America since 1981) there was a bias that poor kids cannot swim. I am glad to sit back now and enjoy the hard labor of more than 45-50 or so years ago.

In the early 60's, Boris Kazmiroff from the National Council of YMCA's and I organized the first Learn-to-Swim movement in Sri Lanka.  Hitherto the best swimmers from the country were from Colombo, the place where rich people lived and those who had access to swimming pools.  Poor village kids were poor swimmers, just doing a bit of the dog paddle and never could enter for swimming competition. There was some sort of bias in Sri Lanka at that time that you needed class (to be rich) to be able to swim. Well, that was soon to change.

Boris and I trained swimmers to be swimming instructors and the gangs departed to all parts of the country teaching poor children how to swim. They were taught to swim not in first class swimming pools but in rivers and oceans.  All our work was voluntary.  As the numbers kept adding up, within a few years the Learn-to-Swim Board at taught more than 10,000 village children the finer art of swimming and so swimming picked up in the villages of Sri Lanka.  With a few years thereafter, the annual 2-mile open sea swim which was normally always won by a classy man or woman from Colombo, was now won by one of the poorer village kids from the outskirts of the country. The other double whammy of the Learn to Swim movement was that the drowning rates of children declined as more village kids learned to swim.

What made me repeat this story is now hearing of the bias in America that blacks can't swim.  Finally that bias has been broken with Cullen Jones, an African-American becoming the fastest sprinter in swimming, tearing through the water to complete 50 meters in 22 seconds.  Mr. Jones is held up as a symbol showing off the absurdity of old biases that blacks cannot swim.

Yes, many African-Americans and Hispanics cannot swim because they do not have access to swimming pools in poor neighborhoods, exactly the same situation we had with the village children of Sri Lanka. The Wall Street Journal (Cullen Jones Makes Waves, June 27, 2008) reports that Mr. Jones is not only interested in swimming fast and getting into the Beijing Olympics, but is also making a special effort to create an awareness of the swimming facilities lacking in poorer neighborhoods of America for minority kids to swim. 

Children are naturally attracted to water. In poor developing countries. According to the UN Children’s Fund (UNICEF) in Bangladesh, there were 946 officially reported flood-related deaths since mid-August, with drowning accounting for 816 of them. Over 86 percent of all the deaths were due to drowning, and over 90 percent of these cases were children under five. Busy mothers with a large family, a home and many children to care for are often unable to watch over the little ones. At the time of the drowning incident, most mothers or caregivers were involved either in household activities or were working outside. Lack of adequate supervision turns out to be the key contributor to these preventable deaths.  At least if the children know how to swim they can save themselves or another child.

In an effort to address this, UNICEF is working closely with the developing country to reduce the number of child deaths by drowning and other injuries.  The partnership includes establishing community crèches, providing Swim for Life lessons, tracking incidences of injury, as well as hosting meetings to discuss specific injury deaths and finding ways to prevent them.  For instance, in flood-prone Bangladesh, drowning is the single leading cause of death among children aged 1-17, having overtaken pneumonia and diarrhea. I hope UNICEF continues these programs with a vengeance in countries where there are lots of rivers. 

The Centers for Disease Control have issued new warnings about the problems of children drowning.  For instance in 2005, there were 3,582 unintentional drownings in the U.S., according to the CDC.  More than one in four fatal drownings were children 14 and younger. States may want to have programs to make  swimming a compulsory subject, teaching kids to at least swim a few yards, enough to save their lives from drowning in a swimming pool or small patch of backyard water.

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The Wall Street Journal (Cullen Jones Makes Waves, June 27, 2008) reports that Mr. Jones is not only interested in swimming fast and getting into the Beijing Olympics, but is also making a special effort to create an awareness of the swimming facilities lacking in poorer neighborhoods of America for minority kids to swim.

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