October 2014: First Aid Training & Swimming Lessons
16.10.2014
The activities at marinecultures.org go beyond maintaining farms and sponges. Especially safety is important to us! We’ve attended a swimming instructor crash course in Switzerland that enables us to efficiently teach our sponge farmers to swim. Like most women in Zanzibar our sponge farmers never learnt to swim and are now slowly picking up a skill we consider as vital in their job. The divers all receive a PADI training prior to working in the deeper farms or on other projects that require scuba diving. Together with the boat crew they receive additional oxygen- and first aid training.
The sponge production is gaining momentum and sponge sales have to be expanded in cooperation with Okala. Our aim for 2015: sponge farmers Key and Nassir become completely independent and can make a living from selling sponges on the local market. This still requires a bit of work. Most shops don’t have a nice sales display such as the Seaweed Center in Paje. But more importantly, we will have to increase the number of retailers.
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