Becky Horsbrugh
DROWNING PREVENTION
I held out my hand to seven-yearold Salman and beckoned to him to get in. A huge grin swept across his face and he chuckled loudly as he ignored my assistance and instead jumped in the pond, splashing me with water. But I didn’t really care. I was as happy as he was, as I was achieving my ambition to help out with teaching swimming in rural Bangladesh. My trip had taken several months of planning and began when I first came across an article about, of all things, young girls playing cricket in the country. That led me to find out more about a British-run charity called Sreepur Village based around 60 kilometres north of the capital Dhaka, where the girls lived. I then began to read about how big an issue child drowning was in the country and how it was the leading cause of child death. I then knew I had to go there to try and help in whatever little way I could, being a qualified swimming teacher myself. The statistics really are quite shocking. Around 50 children a day die in Bangladesh in the water.