Vietnam Swans

As you may recall, at the ANZAC Friendship Match, we raised VND19.5 million (USD1,030) for the Hoi An Children’s Swimming Program. Jo Stewart, the Program Manager sent the letter below to the Vietnam Swans.

To everyone at the Vietnam Swans

Thank you so much for your extremely generous contribution of VND19.5 million to the Hoi An Children’s Swimming Program.  The money is being used to pay for transport to enable us to bring the 600-700 children to the swimming pool over the course of the summer. Each child will attend 18 lessons. Each school participating in the program gets an allocation from this amount, with the schools furthest away from the pool receiving the most money.  This $1,030 covers roughly one quarter of the total transport cost.  Each school is responsible for paying the rest.  The school also decides what is the most appropriate means of transport.  Most schools put on a bus.  Some schools which still cannot afford to pay for a bus use the money to have someone accompany the children on their bicycles.

I want you all to understand that having the transport this year makes a huge difference.  The area of Hoi An is extremely spread out.  In order to come to swim class some of the children have to travel up to 15km by bicycle. Having transport means that this year we can open up the lessons to younger children, and obviously, the earlier we can teach them the less risk they have of drowning. We can also offer lessons to children in more rural areas, which also tend to be the higher risk areas. In addition it means that the attendance rate is higher so the children’s swimming skills are better at the end of the program.  And last, but certainly not least, the children are safe on their way to and from class.

One of our main initiatives for this year is our Train the Trainer program. We have an AustSwim training course presenter arriving at end May.  She will be running an intensive teacher training course for 20 of the local PE teachers. We are working with AustSwim so that the teachers receive official AustSwim accreditation at the end of the course. This is part of our long term plan to introduce the necessary skills so that the local schools have the knowledge and experience to be able to provide swim teaching themselves.

So many thanks again for your generousity. If any of you ever come to Hoi An, please do get in touch and you can come watch a class in action. If you are interested please have a look at our website where you can find some further info on the program.

Best regards
from everyone at the Hoi An Children’s Swimming Program

To read the May Newsletter for the Hoi An Children’s Swimming Program, click .