How to Save a Life

It's not easy for me to just bring this up as a "highlight" to my recent trip to Brazil, but an experience I learned from.

It was an experience that has reassured my feelings that EVERYONE needs to learn how to swim.    I took lessons my whole life and got to the highest level of swimming before taking actual lifeguard training. I even swam on a swim team in 8th grade just to give it a try.

While in Brazil, me and my wife's family vacationed to the ocean and rented a beach apartment in Sao Paulo for the weekend, the beach name is escaping me right now. 

Many of her family members don't really know how to swim and are a little timid to go in the water.  My wife doesn't like the water, and that stems from her seeing first hand, a guy drown in the ocean at her father's work function when she was younger.  Since she's been scared of swimming.  When we got married she braved the pool waters to start learning how to swim and take lessons.  Something I'm very proud of her for doing.   She's not quite to the point where she's confident in swimming, but she's progressing.

Back to the story.  While at the beach, me and my Sister-In-Law's boy friend Joao Carlos, decided to go for a swim in the ocean.  We were probably the only two that really knew how to swim in the family.  Our swimming really only was bobbing up and down in the waves but going out about 6 feet deep of water.  This weekend the waves were relatively high, which made it kind of fun, like the old 'wave pools' here in Minnesota.  We had some fun swimming and diving into the waves.  I should also preface this and say that I've been teaching myself Portuguese and feel like I'm about 50-60% fluent at the moment.  Enough to have "Street Portuguese" but am able to have a standard but more than basic conversation.

At some point while swimming Joao (John in English) called over to me, and he was trying to help a guy struggling to swim.  But Joao was also pretty small and was having trouble helping him too.  So I swam over to this guy and grabbed his wrist and Joao and I both tried to pull him in.  The under current was pretty strong that day, but this guy got in a little too deep for his comfort.  The water depth, however was only about 5'-9' (feet) at any given time because of the waves.  But once I had his hand/arm in my grip, we tried swimming back to shore. It was actually pretty tough, because of the current, and I actually thought about putting him in the standard lifeguard hold of securing my arm around his head and have him try to float in on his back while I swam him in.  Not sure why I didn't do it, but part of it was the language barrier I had and not being able to explain what I was going to do. Anyway, it probably took about 5 minutes to swim him back into a spot in the water where he could stand. His dad and another family member were probably in about 3 feet of water watching and waiting.  But it was a challenge for me to swim him back but we got back!

This guy and his dad thanked me for helping me, and I acknowledged.  To me, I just felt like it was my duty to do it and a natural reaction.  I didn't feel like I was a hero or anything, but looking back on it now, I suppose I did (could have) save his life. I will never know how it could have turned out, but I feel proud for helping him.  I've never done that before.


But it reassured my beliefs in that everyone needs to know how to swim to even at least a somewhat intermediate level.  We have my 2 1/2 year old daughter Olivia now in her 3rd round of swimming lessons. She loves swimming, and is picking up the basics.

It will be my strong belief moving forward that all my kids and family all have a pretty solid swimming foundation.  Especially since we live in the 'Land of 10,000 lakes.'

Thanks for reading.

Chris