Swimming swimming in Lake Bunyonyi…

December marked the beginning of school holidays which meant holiday swim camps could begin!! Here’s what we envisioned for the swim camps…

There would be registration, limiting the number of swimmers to 20. We would focus on non-swimmers and run 2 weeks of camp meaning 40 kids from one community. The first community we targeted was Burimba, which had a high proportion of non-swimmers. We selected this community for this reason and also because the teacher trained as a swim instructor was no longer teaching there. We planned to have 2 one hour swimming lessons each morning, with games, songs and morning tea to break up the lessons and enable the kids to warm up from the cold temperature of the lake.

Here’s what really happened…
We decided to visit the community before running the swim camps in the hopes of registering some children as well as to inform people about the swim camp. The best time to meet with a community is after the Sunday church service. So, off we went to yet another church service, which is all in Rukiga and where we are usually seated at the front of the church. Following the service, we made an announcement that was greeted with laughter. We are still unsure whether it was the idea of a swim camp…or whether there was something lost in translation…regardless – no one registered.

Therefore, we sent a letter to the headmaster of the Burimba primary school requesting that he select 20 non-swimmers to meet us at the swimming area on the first day of our ‘swim camp’. As an afterthought, we asked Norman (a local swim instructor employed by LBDC) to come along with us to the camps to help with translation. The first day of swim camp, we were greeted by 56 children wanting to learn to swim. The headmaster had brought some kids, who were incidentally not non-swimmers, and the rest of the crew gathered at the swim area as soon as they saw the two muzungu.

We tried to tell Norman that 56 kids was too many! We explained that we would return to Burimba to run another swim camp, and that if we limited the number of kids they would receive more attention and better instruction. Things don’t work like that here. Norman explained to us that if we turned kids away, they would not come back when we returned. Okay then, 56 kids it is. Sidenote: the number increased daily….

How do you teach 56 kids?? It took us a few days to figure out a good technique…and it wasn’t long before our ideas of songs, games etc. were thrown out the window. Although, we did try the ‘human knot’ on the first day…disaster. They could not understand why you would want to make a human puzzle..and then solve it…awkward. You should have seen the look on Norman’s face when we were explaining the rules to him…he was so confused…or more – perplexed, silly muzungu.

The technique we finally settled on was to divide the kids into four groups based on their swimming ability.

We would start teaching together, one of us staying mainly dry while the other did demonstrations, while Norman translated from land. (Sidenote: Without Norman, swim camp would have been a total bust – seeing as one of the few swimming related things we can say in Rukiga is “amaguru gananukire” – “legs straight”.) Once the person doing the demonstrations could no longer feel her hands…or feet…or was shivering uncontrollably, she would get out to warm up, while the other remained in the water and continued teaching and doing any necessary demonstrations. Once, she was too cold to go on…Norman would then get in the water and teach. This way we could maximize the number of children taught…and somewhat minimize the “freezing factor”. We still usually ended up very cold, but at least we had a towel to dry ourselves off and a warm fleece to put on, which is more than most of the kids had.

We were able to provide “tea”, which consisted of bread, bananas and hot tea. Unfortunately because we had intended on only having 20 children…there wasn’t enough to go around. This usually meant, 1/3 of a banana, one slice of bread and a few sips of tea per child, and tended to make “tea” a rather chaotic time. We were very happy once again to have Norman along, because he was able to organize and keep things fair with the distribution of the food.

While trying to warm up, we did sing some repeating songs with the children. We did the normal camp repertoire of “There was a great big moose”, “Let me see your funky chicken”, “The other day, I met a bear”, “Old heiram’s goat”. “Let me see your funky chicken” was a personal favourite among the kids…seeing as they then greeted us everyday as we approached in the dugout canoe with “ooh ah ah ah ooh” (the chorus).

We were very encouraged to have several older girls attend the swim camp. Culturally it is inappropriate for women to swim after they are married. Therefore, it’s important for girls and young women to learn to swim before this time. We were also encouraged by how much of the community came out to watch the lessons, as well as by how many kids went from being very afraid, to being comfortable in the water. There was also a fair bit of improvement in the strokes of the kids who were already able to swim. Some even listened to our much repeated advice “amaguru gananukire”. We were quite surprised by how challenging it was to teach swimming with so little Rukiga, it was hard to give feedback, instructions and corrections. It was also challenging teaching in a lake environment with a very small area of shallow water. The mud clouded the water, making it difficult for the kids to see what we were doing in our demonstrations.

All in all, the swim camp was a big success. At the end of the week we handed out swim certificates to the kids – you could tell that they were excited and proud to receive them. We hope that this will mean even more support for swimming lessons in the community in the future.

We will be running more swim camps throughout January – this week we are off to Buhumba. How many kids will we find there….or should we say…how many kids will find us? We are a little afraid by the fact that Buhumba Primary School has 800 students…oh my.