Thank you for your response. Perhaps it was not the input your organization wanted, but it is important for any organization or business to receive honest feedback. I am in a unique position in that I have been able to learn about, and discuss two separate adaptive scuba programs with people who are very new to scuba diving.
For me, I began in september of last year and I have two friends who began learning to scuba dive under the Diveheart program around the spring of this year. All three of us are totally blind. Therefore, we compare notes often and I can honestly tell you right now that my friends are jealous of the training I have received and the competence of my instructors.
Their instructor, a Diveheart instructor for years, felt inadequately prepared to teach two totally blind students. It is true that he went through the empathy training required by Diveheart, but despite that, teaching totally blind students was a new and different challenge. He has since risen to the challenge and has learned valuable knowledge and experience. My experience was the complete opposite. From the first day, my scuba instructors made it very obvious, through their interactions with me, that they were confident in the techniques necessary to teach someone with no vision. So what was the difference?
First of all, in order to become an instructor under the system I am being taught under, one must conduct a supervised dive with someone who has a disability. In order to progress, one must continue to conduct dives with those who have a disability. Simulations are not enough. It is one thing to conduct a dive with someone who can see, but has a blindfold or who has blacked out their mask. It is an entirely different experience to dive with a totally blind person.
The second factor is experience. Many of my instructors have worked with totally blind people, as well as with many others with disabilities, for almost ten years and in our program, we dive weekly during the school year. Some have been teaching people with disabilities to scuba dive since 1999. A school year in France lasts for at least 36 weeks and each diving session is about an hour and a half. Therefore, 36 weeks multiplied by 1.5 hours and further multiplied by 20 years equals 1080 hours of experience. This does not take into account any dive trips. Yet, with all of this experience, the instructors still ask us, the divers with disabilities for our input and feedback regarding how to improve the training program. For more information about the Handisub system, I invite you to listen to my podcast entitled "VisionFree Diving.' It can be found on Apple Podcast, Amazon Music, and Spotify, as well as at diving.visionfreeaccess.net.
I realize and fully understand that when the Adaptive Diveheart manual was written, it was based on teaching adaptive skiing and on people with disabilities who wished to learn how to dive. When blind people first approached Handisub in France expressing their desire to learn how to scuba dive, they were the pioneers. Because of this, Handisub instructors leaned heavily on input from the blind people to establish their training program. Even with the tactical hand signals, Handisub instructors worked together with the blind students to create signs that are simple, intuitive and easy to replicate. They conducted hundreds of hours of testing in a pool and in open water and only when the blind divers were satisfied, were the hand signals made official. This entire process took almost three years and the blind divers, though still new to diving, were involved every step of the way.
My friends, who are Diveheart students, are frustrated that I am being taught skills and have access to training they are being denied. This is not due to their ability, it is due to the simple fact that Diveheart's program does not provide the same amount of training. They continually ask me, "Why can't we learn how to do that? If you can do it, why can't we?" It's a valid question and one for which they feel they deserve an answer. Maybe they don't have the aptitude to perform a particular skill, but they will never know if they never try. If they try and physically cannot perform the skill, that's one thing and that's on them. However, if they are denied the opportunity to even try, then that's on the training program itself.
In the Diveheart Adaptive Diver Manual, one of the chapters is entitled, "Imagine the possibilities." My friends are trying to do just that. They are trying to imagine the possibilities, but they are running into barriers and walls imposed by the very program that advocates there are limitless possibilities. I'll close with one of my favorite quotes by Helen Keller, "The greatest barrier facing the blind is the lack of vision of their sighted friends."
