Overview
In Hue city and throughout the province flooding is extremely common, yet it is common for both adults and children to be unable to swim. By providing free swimming lessons for the most disadvantaged children - who are also those most likely to be living in precarious housing in flood prone areas - we can help limit the human cost of extreme weather conditions. Our Swimming for Safety programme has two elements - a rural and an urban operation.
SFS Urban - Children's shelters
In 2007, Hue Help carried out a survey of the children's shelters in Hue. We found that around 95% of the the children could not swim. Children living in this sort of environment, where supervision is usually substantially less than in a family environment, are placed at great risk during times of flooding.
Our programme teaches children in these risk areas basic swimming skills, but also rescue and prevention skills.
SFS Rural Expansion
In 2011 we brought our swimming programme to rural Vietnam to provide high quality swimming tuition where it was needed most. In the summer of 2011, our swimming programme reached around 1,200 children in 10 communes in Phu Loc district in the Thua Thien Hue province.
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SFS Children's Shelters
Our urban swimming programme operates in Hue city at the local swimming pools, and provides free swimming tuition to children living in shelters. We run this programme in conjuction with Hue Sport's Centre, who support a third of the cost of the tuition.
Aside from the risk that children face if they cannot swim, our programme provides the children with a great chance to exercise, meet a lot of other children, and gives them another activity during their summer holiday period.
The programme is currently open to all shelters (orphanages) in Hue city, and runs for six weeks during the summer holidays. The programme has run five times, from 2007 to 2011, and will run again in the summer of 2012.
We have now finalised the project outline and are currently raising funds and looking for potential donors for the swimming programme this summer. Please find below the proposal for the swimming programme for children's shelters 2012. If you have any further questions or would like to contact us, you can send an email to info@huehelp.org.
Swimming Programme proposal and budget for Children's Shelters in Hue, Summer 2012
SFS Rural Expansion
2011 saw our Swimming for Safety programme expand considerably. While we still kept up our commitment to providing swimming training to children's shelters in Hue city, we also expanded our operations to what was a more challenging environment - the surrounding countryside.
Why rural swimming?
The majority of deaths that occur by drowning occur in the rural areas. In 2011, our programme focused on a district of Thua Thien Hue province called Phu Loc. The abundance of open water (rivers, lakes, the lagoon and the sea) means that drowning prevention here is an absolute priority. 2011 saw our pilot programme with the aim of expanding to all rural districts over the coming years.
What's different about swimming teaching in rural Vietnam?
Unlike the city, the countryside lacks the basic infrastructure that makes teaching swimming a relatively easy task - most importantly, there are no public swimming pools! This means that we have to teach the kids to swim in open water - rivers, lakes, lagoon and the sea. There have been numerous successful programmes that have operated internationally in this way that have been tremendously successful, and we are of course working with our partners to ensure that the environments are made safe before they are used.
How did the programme work exactly?
We partnered with Thua Thien Hue Red Cross to implement this programme and we were also working with Phu Loc Education Affairs to ensure that this programme has the full support of the local secondary schools who were taking part in it.
We organised a swimming training course for Red Cross staff and swimming teachers. The Swimming Teacher's Association (STA) partnered with us to train up to thirty swimming teachers, who then worked with ten secondary schools at ten separate sites in the summer of 2011 . In total, these ten sites trained 1,200 children to swim this year.
The pilot programme was overall a great success and we managed to reach the large population that we had aimed for. We plan to continue the programme next year with another group of 1,200 children in Phu Loc district. However, as we already have trained swimming teachers, we will be using the same teachers as last year. We plan to implement the programme from February until May, and are now looking for potential partners with whom we can co-operate to make the second year of this programme another success.
We have now established a plan and project outline for the Swimming for Safety programme in Phu Loc for the year 2012. Please find attached below the proposed budget outline for this year's project in Phu Loc district.
