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Dolphin Club ends shelter children swim program
The 500 Sails’ Dolphin Club recently concluded its Shelter Children swimming program due to the start of classes in public and private schools.
According to 500 Sails president Emma Perez, the Dolphin Club recently took a break from its regular adult swim classes to accommodate a new program that would teach shelter children how to swim.
“We kind of took a break from adult swimming to focus on swim classes for the kids living in shelters,” she said.
Perez said the purpose of the program was to occupy the attention of children during such a troubled time and to give parents the opportunity to go to work or just take a break while their children were off learning to swim.
Perez said since the devastation of Super Typhoon Yutu, 500 Sails has gone out of its way to pick up all interested shelter children and bring them to Pau Pau Beach where they’d swim for most of the day.
“We picked up the shelter kids, since they’re out of school, and three days a week we’ve been teaching the kids how to swim…First, we were catering to the kids sheltered at the Marianas High School shelter but we later started picking up kids at Tanapag Elementary School and Gregorio T. Camacho Elementary School and taking them to Pau Pau,” she said.
Perez said the swimming program stemmed from the original Gamsun project that was created to prepare high school students to pass the swim test needed to become official lifeguards.
“It came out of the Gamsun project, which was started before the typhoon. That’s a project…to get high school students ready to pass the swim test needed to take a lifeguard class…” she said.
The students participating in the Gamsun project also volunteered to clean up the typhoon debris that littered the beach by the Guma Sakman in Susupe.
