Mansi

My internship for the past 3 weeks has been to work at a non-profit organization that works with developmentally disabled adults. I have enjoyed every second of it and I have no complaints at all. For the past couple of weeks, the 3 others interns and I have gotten opportunities to take the individuals of the Walnut Street Center on different outings. Last week, I had the opportunity to go swimming with a few of the individuals. I had no idea what to expect except that it was going to be very different from anything I’d ever done before. So, I got into the van and we made the 40-minute drive to Fernald, an institute with an extremely disturbing past (see Ilana’s blog entry). Anyway, there were 4 individuals that I was going to be working with. We all got changed and headed to the pool. It was the first time swimming for one of the individuals while another was a superb swimmer. The three individuals that could swim went into the water and the one that could not was brought into the water via a “water wheel-chair”. After getting the individual into the water, three life jackets were placed on him to assure that everything would go smoothly. At first, the individual freaked out and went on to grab/hit/smack/scratch/punch anything he could get his hands on. But after soothing him a little, he calmed down and began to relax. By the end of the two hours, not only had I been beaten in a race, but the individual that had never swam before became comfortable in the water (or at least knew that there was no chance of drowning) and floated alone. We enjoyed a nice lunch at the creepy facilities afterwards and headed home. I learned that swimming with individuals that have developmental disabilities is not much different from swimming with my friends at home. Sure, you need to take a lot more things such as accessibility into consideration, but besides that, it is the same. Everyone needs some time to get used to the water and feel comfortable in it. And those that are already great swimmers will challenge you to a race and proceed to beat you 5 times in a row. This was an incredible experience and I had a great time. And for the record, I (along with my co-workers) have the best internship we could possibly hope for. I mean who else gets to go swimming as a part of their job?