After a visit to England I went to a small place in Norway best known for hosting the Olympics in 1994 – Lillehammer. But my agenda there had nothing to do with olympic games. Anders Orpana, the DDI Representative of Norway had me over to complete the first ever Assistant Diver Course in my home country!
An Assistant Diver is trained in assisting handicapped divers with mild to severe disabilities, which basically means letting your creativity blossom for a weekend. You learn how to distribute weights and floaters on someone without legs for instance, as well as preparing a dive site and much more.
The first day had a very clear purpose: make me feel for myself how it may be like being handicapped. Anders first chained me to a wheelchair, and had me experience the challenges that comes with not having two feet for walking. The next challenge was about trust. Being handicapped generally means that you will have to depend on other people., and trust is essential. To simulate this, and put me in a similar situation, I had to climb a wall wearing a mask covered in duct tape.
Anders secured the rope while I mentally prepared to put my life (at least a cracked rib or two) in his hands. Being blind and climbing walls is quite a challenge, but very enjoyable. At the top he made me let go and just hang there in the secured rope. It was REALLY hard, and even took me a few seconds, to force my hands to loosen their grip on the wall.
We then came to the diving part. To start with, I dived with the duct taped mask, which meant I could see practically…nothing. After doing skills and then have my feet strapped together to simulate amputated legs – it was Anders´turn to be handicapped, and me to lead. I had to lead both a ”blind” diver and a tetraplegic diver – which was really hard! I would probably have drowned Anders if he was tetraplegic for real. Thankfully, Anders later told me that they never have just one Assistant Diver when assisting a tetraplegic. So I felt a little bit better.
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The following day we combined my Assistant Diver Course with a real Try Dive. Geir Arne Hageland (from www.funkibator.no), an active guy on land, decided to try diving with us.
He has no legs from the knees down, and so we spent some time getting the weighting right to prevent him tumbling round – it is amazing how much you use your feet to stabilize yourself in the water! Try strapping your feet together once, I guarantee you will find it a LOT harder to maintain stability. But after just a few minutes, Geir really got the hang of it.
Diving for disabled persons has a lot more to it than just the diving experience and mastery of a new environment – there are also advantages when it comes to rehabilitation which you can only benefit from in a zero gravity environment. It will be very exciting to see how the use of diving can help rehabilitation of different disorders in the future!
