DDI Instructor Course Weekend

We all started off our DDI (Disabled Diving Instructor) course, meeting at Emirates Academy, Umm Suqeim for an introduction to the new and fast-growing niche in the diving world, Disabled Diving.

The course began with a brief introduction to partners Fraser, President of the course, and Flemming, a Disabled Diving Instructor and Vice-President flown in especially from Denmark. We learned about their background, personal motivations to start the course and some very inspiring stories to start us off.

Lectures touched upon new information, new concepts of diving and most importantly, a new perspective on the disabled community in Dubai. A particularly shocking point was that some people are often ‘dropped off’ and left at rehabilitation homes by their own families and never seen again, largely under the belief that disabilities are shameful and a punishment. We soon realised the importance of such programmes in integrating these people back into the community and breaking the ‘barriers’ often presented to them by their disabilities; personally and due to prejudice. The idea goes by an inclusive rather than exclusive attitude. Community awareness and education seemed to be key to promoting acceptance.

With the support and free motion offered by water we saw (videos) and learned how Scuba Diving is an exciting and often very accessible hobby for people with disabilities to take up, often creating hope and igniting a new or already present passion for diving. We saw wheel-chair bound divers, freely doing multiple flips underwater under their own control. We also saw amazing examples, which even doctors couldn’t explain, of people with conditions (such as muscular dystrophy sufferers) who had not moved limbs for 18 years, temporarily re-gaining motion in water during the dive. You can only imagine the excitement and happiness brought to the diver and their family by this event, and from this it becomes more obvious why this is sport can be so alluring to such a person.

We learned about different disabilities the course involves, and how these divers may be limited. We were given extensive examples and discussions on how not to and how to best assist the divers.

In the afternoon, after taking time to consider the examples and information given during the morning session, we started on some pool work. Fraser and Flemming demonstrated various in-water techniques to help lift divers out of the water, swimming techniques for divers without motion in their legs and how to turn your body over using purely your arm muscles. They also ran through a simulated scenario for a session with a partially-sighted diver using blacked-out masks. We had the chance to test out some specially designed equipment to facilitate diving for different needs, such as webbed gloves, specially designed fins and full-face underwater masks for breathing.

Experiencing diving from the divers perspective, opened everyone’s eyes to a completely new way of diving. Even tasks, which have become somewhat ‘automatic’ to us, like assembling equipment, required a new and revised approach. We were also presented with new challenges such as tactile communication – a specially developed underwater sign language to communicate normal diving information, such as depth, air pressure and the typical skills to be demonstrated. This exercise helped us to better assist these student divers by understanding, first hand, their needs and perspective with regards to the dive. Overall, everyone had a lot of fun throughout the pool session, and we ended feeling enthusiastic to start getting some divers signed onto the course.

Personally, I think the DDI course has opened a whole new and exciting aspect of diving which appeals to a completely different audience compared to most available courses. It offers not only hope for the future disabled divers, but also hope to positively change the misinformed attitudes we learned about at the start. Here, a common theme that everyone can relate to seemed obvious; a challenge, and that overcoming this challenge is often more rewarding than achieving something naturally and effortlessly, because it is from this effort that we are really appreciative and rewarded by our achievements.

I know everyone on the course was inspired by the admirable achievements which have been made by some people already, and were eager to see for themselves how they can apply this new learning to benefit people here in our own community in the same way.