I have written twice before about the indelible image, from several years ago, still burned in my memory today. It was of an elderly grandmother lying powerlessly on the sand in Cocorite, grieving next to the bodies of her two grandsons who had drowned and had just been pulled up onto the beach near the foreshore highway. They were eight and 10 years old and had, according to the newspaper, been spending some school holidays at their granny's house nearby. The senselessness of the loss, the sight of the two boys, the fact that we will never know who they may have become and the grandmother's anguish conspired to take a part of me and to own it forever.
Since then there have been more than a hundred drownings. It is simply a tragedy that, in a country surrounded by water, so few know how to swim and so many are drowning, sometimes three or four at a time. It is also tragic that all these deaths seem to mean nothing to anyone and that while the headlines scream about us versus them, he versus she, big versus small and this party against that party, nobody speaks to the issue of lives being needlessly lost. In Canada, which has a land mass of huge proportions compared to T&T, swimming is taught to primary school students. Lives are saved and enriched by the swimming lessons and the children grow into adults who have a greater capacity to enjoy water sports and outdoor activities.
Our Minister of Sport is highly accomplished and respected in the field of swimming. Surely it would not be impossible for him to introduce mandatory swimming lessons for our children as part of physical education in schools. I remember many years ago reading about a near drowning in which the person, after he had been pulled to safety by lifeguards, told others around him, "I was swimming good and all of a sudden I fell in a hole." I remember thinking then, as I do now, that this man was not swimming, he was walking and that is to show how lacking we are in our knowledge of what swimming is. So bad is our knowledge of the subject that many of our citizens think that wading in the water is actually swimming. In the last two weeks more than 10 people have drowned on our North Coast alone. There were also two lost in Tobago as well.
As the long Easter weekend approaches and we head for every beach that we know, I hope that something will be said or done about the lives being lost by drowning and that an effort will be made to save those lives with a simple warning: Be careful in the water; stay in the shallow; do not chase inflatable objects. And could we spread out our lifeguards to the known danger spots?
Gregory Aboud
Port-of-Spain