More than a dozen shivering children sip soup from tin mugs while they chew on white bread in the bedraggled clubhouse at Strandfontein Pavilion.
Every so often the lights flicker off – a symptom of the rainy weather and degrading infrastructure.
Most of the children are from the Sewende Laan and Die Tak informal settlements in Strandfontein. Others are from the Pelican Swim School in Pelican Heights.
As the lights flicker on again, coach Omar Nordien (54) loudly announces that it’s time to leave, but nobody moves.
In one corner, children roughhouse while volunteers in the kitchen stack cleaned cups to make room for others being cleared from the wooden tables. Omar makes another call as he switches his second youngest grandson’s grip from one hand to the other. The family jokes that this grandson, the fourth of five, is “Oupa’s boy” since he clings to his grandfather like a barnacle – to the point that Omar sometimes has to conduct his swimming lessons with the boy hanging around his neck in the water. Attempts to dislodge the toddler are usually met with shrieks and Omar being gripped in an unintended chokehold.
Shehaam Nordien (53) chuckles as her husband’s third attempt to rally the swimmers for home is pointedly ignored.
“The vibe is too lekker here,” she laughs.
Giving back
Shehaam and Omar run Pelican Swim School in Pelican Heights, but earlier this year they partnered with Strandfontein Surf Life-Saving Club to teach life-saving to nippers and micro-nippers – which are children between the ages of 6 and 14.
The project, which Omar has named The Conduit, and for which he recently filed non-profit registration forms, aims to boost the number of swimmers entering junior life-saving training, but it also has another purpose.
“Life-saving gave me an opportunity in life and therefore I can see the potential of what it can offer young people. For me it has become a permanent opportunity, it’s become a means of sustaining my family. A career.”
The idea for the project germinated from the Nordien’s concern about the children who frequently begged at the robots on the corner of Strandfontein and Spine Roads. Omar’s idea to teach the children life-saving however only came about after he had rejoined life-saving in December last year.
“For a long while we’d been thinking, ‘how do we assist these people?’, not realising that the opportunity was already there but I’d removed myself from it.”
Lifesaving club
Omar had been doing life-saving as a sport since he was 11 years old, but he left in later years because of “politics”.
“I’ve been out of lifesaving for a number of years but I was invited to a programme that they held and I saw that the club has taken a massive dip.”
The club, which had been very successful before, with several members competing at a national level, had significantly deteriorated.
Omar said this was partly because previously disadvantaged athletes took the opportunities which had been opened to them post-apartheid to join the ranks of “the elite”.
“But this created a vacuum,” he said, explaining that this left disadvantaged communities without skills and this was compounded by a lack of resources.
When Omar visited the club again for the first time after many years, they asked him to help rebuild.
Among the voices urging him was his son-in-law who told him: “The generation that is supposed to be holding us up at Strandfontein is not doing it.”
“I’ve benefitted from that environment,” Omar said. “And I felt an obligation to give back.”
He met with the club’s chair to discuss integrating swimmers from his school into the programme and he invited the children in the informal settlements to take part.
Lifeguards in training
“Before we knew it, we were sitting with over 70 kids,” Omar said.
“When capable people don’t get involved, incapable people take positions for which they are not qualified. I am qualified for some of these positions, so if I don’t do it, I’m not fulfilling my responsibility.”
Omar’s qualifications include being a certified swim coach and life-guard.
He is also an able sportsman who qualified for the national swimming team in his youth and won several ironman titles. He still regularly takes part in marathon swims and triathlons.
However, the potential to possibly become an elite sportsperson is only one of the perks of the programme, he said.
“This is what life-saving offers young people,” he said.
“They can get qualified at the age of sixteen and work for the City. So for seven months of the year in Cape Town, they can earn about R15 000 a month.
“This is a decent salary for a young person, especially if they are from an underprivileged community.”
Shehaam adds: “In sport, if you fund a bursary for someone, the only option that person has is to become the best at that sport to make it a career.
“Life-saving, on the flipside of the coin, is a sport, but it is also a life-skill and can lead to part-time work for a young person, keeping him off the streets. It’s such a door-opener. 9Miles has a similar vision and what they are doing is excellent.”
A long way to go
9Miles, which is also based in Strandfontein and aims to uplift children through water sports and education, are assisting the Nordien’s project by providing wetsuits, boards and transport.
To keep the project afloat however, the Nordien’s hope more donors will come on board to provide the children with food, toiletries and clothes. They are currently giving the children a meal, after their lessons, twice a week.
“At the moment it is coming from our and the parents at the swimming school’s pockets,” Shehaam said.
Omar added: “The basic needs, that are giving them dignity, are soap and clothes, so that they don’t feel like they are less than the others because their clothes are worn out.”
In the long term Shehaam hopes to upgrade the clubhouse with properly equipped toilets, showers and a kitchen, and properly working electricity.
Lastly, they need funding to pay for the life-saving club’s fees, which is R500 a year for nippers.
“After looking after their basic needs, we can look at making them life-savers or athletes,” Omar said.
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