Blue House Swimming

From left to right: Emmanuel, Rodney, ABK, Brima, Baillor, Fatta, Joseph Sam and Suli (Mohai was in the UK)

One of the local hotels, Eden Park, has kindly agreed to allow us the use of their pool on a weekly basis to take the kids from the Academy swimming. This is a great exercise for the House Teams to strengthen their bond and good for the kids that aren't so great at swimming to boost their confidence. Dave, my fellow House Captain, and I, took the Blue House swimming for the first time a few weekends ago. 
The boys were super excited to go on a House day out, particularly as the Blue House tend to get on very well and we have done several house activities in the past. Unfortunately we were missing Mohai as he was in the UK having knee surgery on a torn tendon from an injury I witnessed on my first visit out here last year. Despite everyone being so excited it took several attempts to get everyone in the vehicle and ready to go! For boys whose every move throughout the day runs to a timetable they are ridiculously disorganised when it comes to social activities.

Eventually we managed to set off and drive the ten minutes down the coast to Eden Park. The hotel resort is set at the edge of Mama Beach, a small community right on the water. The hotel has its own entrance and is far enough down the other end of the beach from the village that you rarely see more than a few people there so its nice and private. 

The chalets and main bar are set in woodland allowing a decent amount of dappled shade and helping to keep the temperature down in the heat of the day. The pool itself is set up on a raised platform behind the main bar, slightly away from the beach. Luckily for our non swimmers there is a shallow end and a deep end so everybody was able to have a turn.

The main idea of the morning is to allow the houses some time as a group away from the Academy doing something different so we mostly allowed the boys time to relax and have fun in the water but we also want to improve confidence and prepare the non swimmers for their swimming lessons later on in the year. There is a rubber ring available so we played a couple of games where the boys would swim into to deep end to reach the rubber ring and rest before swimming back to the shallow end. For those that cannot swim we taught them to hold onto to ring and practice kicking their legs to propel themselves around the pool. For one of the boys, Joseph Sam, who is particularly scared of the water I spent quite some time practicing floating with him and him being comfortable putting his head in the water.