Red Cross trains local volunteers in the African country, one in which the most drownings occur, where there is no lifeguard service and most people do not know how to swim
Guardamar, present at a first aid course in The Gambia. Red Cross is collaborating with the African country for aquatic lifesaving training. In addition to a program aimed at generating infrastructure that makes it possible to prevent drowning deaths, personnel from the humanitarian institution have come to The Gambia to give a first aid and rescue training maritime.
Representing the organization were the Guardamar beach coordinator, Jose Luis Oliva; the beach coordinator and preventive director of Valencia, Macarena Lozano; a volunteer from the Vizcaya Red Cross and a trainer from the Basque Country.
The Gambia is one of the countries with the highest number of drownings, partly because They have no swimming training of any kind and do not have a professional lifeguard device to prevent or reduce the numerous cases of death by drowning that occur in the African country.
The project proposed by the Red Cross has a program in which they are going to build four surveillance chairs on beaches in the area and rescue material is sent from Spain so that a professional lifeguard service can be carried out. According to the organization itself, they are going to hire a team of 16 lifeguards during the three months of high season to cover the country’s beaches and demonstrate to the government that this service, carried out safely, is a dignified service with security guarantees. for the community.
Those three months that the implementation of this team will last will be borne by International Cooperation and, from there, the idea is that they seek financing that allows them to maintain these services for the rest of the year. According to the Red Cross, this project is very interesting “because it allows betting on a quality training to help reduce the number of deaths in the country.
Jose Luis Oliva, Red Cross beach coordinator in Guardamar, comments that it all began last year “when a first trip was made to Gambia, a country with many drowning problems” and of which there was evidence of its precariousness in this sense. because every year”a large number of people die at sea“.
As Oliva explains, “there is no type of professional lifeguard service there, what there is is a voluntary association that does not have enough hours or material.” This, added to the fact that most people do not know how to swim, caused what is considered something “usual” in this sense. “One day five children died on a beach where we were,” says the coordinator.
The cooperative that went to Gambia did an analysis and tried to instruct several people who signed up for the training, but they ran into the problem that a large part of these people had no notion of swimming. The commitment, according to Oliva, “was to train the population there, those who swam the best and those who had already served as lifeguards as volunteers.”
In this way, the second trip to the African country consisted of training these people in terms of the skills of lifeguards and based on the work system that must be carried out on the beaches. It was, therefore, an express training for a start-up of the service that will begin once Ramadan ends.