The Capital One Bank Dallas YMCA 2011 Turkey Trot

Reasons To Give

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Make a Splash

In partnership with the Apartment Association of Greater Dallas, the YMCA provided water safety lessons to 350 kids and their parents at low-income apartment complexes in 2010.

A team of YMCA Swim Instructors and YMCA Lifeguards were dispatched to 12 area apartment complexes to teach swim lessons and basic water safety to residents for 45 minutes a day, 2 days a week for 4 weeks.

With youth, YMCA swim instructors focused on basic skills that improve water competency; for parents, they provided water safety lessons and materials to help them keep their children safe around water

Eritrean Family at Wildflower

One of the first families that we met at the pool this summer was from Eritrea, a small country nestled in east Africa and marked by decades of civil unrest. Upon arriving at the Wildflower apartment complex, our team observed two young girls sheepishly watching the lifeguards set up for the first day of swim lessons. We promptly invited them to participate in the swim lessons and they enthusiastically ran back to their apartment to get permission.  Suddenly, their father appeared at the pool looking quite anxiously and agitated. Though it was clear that he did not speak English he kept repeating the word “Lifeguard?… Lifeguard? …. over and over again. We assured him the swim lessons would be conducted by YMCA life guards. He reluctantly allowed four of his children to swim with us. For the following several weeks, he nervously paced the pool tenderly watching his children learn to swim.

Over time, we came to love this family and we came to understand that the swim lessons that the YMCA provides is more than just an aquatic experience. We learned that the family had been persecuted in Eritrea – of eight siblings, only two survived the civil unrest – their father and an uncle. In order to keep his family safe, they attempted to flee the country – a long and arduous process that found them in a refugee camp for two years before arriving in The United States. Shortly, after arriving, the family was placed in a 2 bedroom apartment in the Wildflower complex next to one of the swimming pools. We learned that the family had watched helplessly as one of their friend’s from the refugee camp drowned just a week before we began swim lessons. The father learned the word “Lifeguard” – his 1st word in English when the apartment complex mangers attempted to explain that they were not liable for his friend’s death since no lifeguard was on duty at the time of the drowning.  They quickly pointed to the standard pool signage stating that there was no lifeguard on duty.  And of course, there never is … without our efforts and interventions, countless children, like our Eritrean friends, would be in peril – unable to swim yet placed in environments where pools are accessible and adults are either unavailable or are unable to swim themselves. 

These traumatic set of events, and others like them, don’t have to happen. Children in Dallas don’t have to drown and they don’t have to watch adults drown. And the way to make this happen is to continue with the programming and research that we did through the Make-A-Splash campaign last summer. We know that there are many more families like this one and we look forward to continuing with this mission.

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