SNAP Wednesdays | Not very nice

I hear mumbling at a distance from me, but I ignore it. Special Needs Aquatics Program shares time at the heated therapy pool with senior citizens, so there is always congestion. We helpers watch out for each other to avoid collisions with elderly folks. Safety is number one, especially because all of the youth we teach do not have the motor skills to support themselves in the water. A couple of us are also CPR certified, which is, thankfully, a skill we have yet to employ.

I turn back to J, a teenager with cerebral palsy. We're in the middle of the pool, and working on his breathing. J usually lifts his head straight out of the water to take a gulp of air when I support him in a modified version of front crawl. I tell J, "This time, turn your head to the side to breathe, so your body is more balanced when you come up."

More mumbling. Louder, this time.

The mumbling is coming from a dark-haired woman probably in her sixties. Another elderly woman, who I presume to be her friend, is next to her. She has a noodle (you know, one of those long, fluorescent-colored flotation devices) stuck under her leg. She's flailing backwards a little bit, but the other woman is close enough that I thought she was talking to her.

"I said, 'Get this out from under me!' " The dark-haired woman is talking to me.

I look at J, whose face registered confusion. J cannot stand up on his own, and as his helper, I never leave him alone for even a minute. So I grab him by the armpits and kick us both over to the woman. I shift all of J's weight onto my left arm. With my free right arm, I pull the noodle out from under the woman's leg. She immediately latches onto my right arm. I find myself supporting both an 18-year old boy and an obese woman in the middle of the pool. Even with the buoyancy of the water, having two people cling to you is no joke. I feel us all sinking slowly, even with my frantic kicking.

"Next time I tell you to do something, you better goddamn do it, you m-f-ing idiot!" The dark-haired woman is yelling at me now.

As I'm struggling to keep J's head above water with one arm, the woman's proximate friend finally arouses from her stupor and pries her friend off my body. We're no longer sinking. Thank God. The woman mumbles expletives to her friend and shoots me dirty looks as they scuttle away.

My first thought was, "How dare she?" How dare she blame me when she was clearly the one who lacked water safety skills in the deep end? How dare she interrupt my class session with her expletives and accusatory remarks? How dare she feel a sense of entitlement to my help when my hands were already tied? How dare she insult me when I just saved her from drowning?

J looks at me and says, "That w-was not very nice." I say, "J, I agree. But sometimes, people are just like that." I take a few deep breaths and we resume class.


One of the truest things I've heard in a long time is that it is difficult to have a soft heart and thick skin, said by Pastor Albert at Regen. I think as I build up my "thick skin" by not letting experiences like this phase me, I struggle to retain compassion for people who openly show their ugly side. And the flip side, when I'm at the Emergency Department on Fridays, I see heartbreaking things that make me want to weep--and sometimes, I do; and then my mind is fixated on the brokenness of the human condition, of East Oakland.

Sigh. I'm trying. God, help me please.

SNAP Wednesdays | Failure to thrive

Today, J didn't come to class. "At least he talked to you. Some helpers, he didn't even look at." I breathed a sigh of disappointment. It hurts to feel like you've failed.

The director paired me with another boy, also named J. J is nearly 4 years old, but looks like a tiny baby. He wears Blue's Clues diapers. He is the size of a 4-month old and can be cradled in my arms. He's adorable! And he cried the entire hour.

Since Berkeley Warm Pool is cohabited by elderly folks doing water exercises, they occasionally waded over to give me advice about calming down J's wailing.

"Keep talking to him," they said, "Gently pat him on the back," they said.

So I held him over my shoulder, and walked back and forth in the shallow end. I told J all about what I ate for breakfast (peanut butter sandwich, is anyone surprised?), how my day went (pretty well, since one of my post-midterm classes was canceled), what I think being a baby is like (obviously this was a desperate attempt at making small talk). Other times, I just hummed and murmured into his ear. I forsook the actual therapy portion of SNAP, and just played babysitter.

His mom came at the end of the hour, and explained to me his condition. Failure to thrive is a medical diagnosis that refers to poor physical and/or mental growth, especially in children.

It's odd how we take things like growth for granted. I just assume that when I am a certain age, I will look and act like I am a certain age. As cute as he is, or as "normal" as he looks, J may not.

I need to remember that I share into not just the time that I'm in the pool with the children, but that my thoughts and prayers can extend further to the parents and siblings.

SNAP Wednesdays

You are correct, SNAP Mondays are no longer. Today was the first day of volunteering for a Wednesday class of Special Needs Aquatics Program for me.

I was really excited last night. I imagined meeting my swimmer; his or her smiling face, eager for being in the water and enjoying freedom of movement. So I carried over last semester's expectations with me to the heated pool at 4pm, early for my 4:30pm class.

4:30pm came and went. No other helpers from the program were there. 4:45pm came and went. No parents were there, either. Just a bunch of elderly folks in the 94-degree pool, doing water meditation. I took out my IB 140 reader to kill some time. I felt like a silly sunbather who was dressed to swim, but not actually intending to.

At 5:00pm, our program director walks through the door, and some other helpers trickled in after her. Apparently, our Wednesday 4:30pm class has been pushed back to 5:15pm. I didn't get the memo. In times like these, I wish I had a smart phone with internet access so I could check my email throughout the day. Imagine sitting in a humid sauna for 45 minutes, trying to study while looking up every few minutes to check if anyone's arrived. That's basically what I did.

Our program director informs me that my swimmer will not be coming today. Wednesday class is full of older swimmers, aged 15 to 18. My swimmer is 17. I was used to working with E, who was only seven. He was sweet, eager, bubbly, and fairly easy to work with. I think I make a pretty good kindergarten teacher, even in the water, because I have the experience. But 17-year olds are a different story. I have an almost 17-year old brother (Valentine's Day is his birthday!) but my interactions with him will no doubt be different from my interactions with my swimmer.

From what the director told me, my swimmer probably didn't show up to class because he had been very attached to his old helper. In delicate words, he doesn't get along with many helpers, and his special needs have needs of their own. So of course, that made me really nervous. I have big shoes to fill. I don't even know my swimmer yet, and already I'm intimidated by him. I'm afraid of falling short, of not being able to be an effective teacher, of being disliked. In other contexts, like small group, for example, I feel like I could use my wits, maybe throw in some humor, and everything would be okay. I could win people over. But not so in SNAP.

The bond between two individuals is a very mysterious thing indeed, made infinitely more complicated by circumstances.

As I ran home from Milvia and Durant, dehydrated from two hours of heat, and almost late to small group, I couldn't help but think back to E, and how much I missed him. He's on a different day now, at the YMCA, and I probably won't see him again. We were making such great progress, too. I missed teaching with K, with whom I communicated well. I'm on my own this semester. Basically, I missed everything about SNAP Mondays. Then I started thinking about why I had started volunteering for Special Needs Aquatics Program in the first place.

I was swimming at Hearst one day. I had been considering accepting a paid job offer to develop and support Bio 1AL labs. I had a lot on my mind. I was wondering how God could use me in more ways than just my knowledge of biology. I saw a flyer on the wall in the locker room. Volunteer for SNAP! Kids. Swimming. Teaching. Needs. It all made sense. This is was what I was waiting for.

Fast forward to today. I am letting my expectations and fears get the better of me. I need to trust that there is transformation to be had, both in me and in my swimmer. I'm still pretty nervous about next week, about whether or not he'll show up, whether or not he'll like me. I wonder if he is sarcastic, if he likes being talked to as if we were close friends, if he enjoys hearing about what being a college student is like.

I'll let you know next week.

SNAP Mondays | Goggles

I had a hard time justifying my purchase of a new swimsuit, since I don't swim competitively anymore. My senior year (high school, that is) team suit was wearing thin in a couple of areas. 93-degree chlorinated water has degraded my suit faster in two months than in the last four years of recreational swimming at Hearst. It was time. I ordered a TYR Diamondback grab bag suit since it cost less than half of what I paid for my team suit. Basically, a grab bag suit means that they send you any suit they have on hand, in whatever color or style. I am now the owner of a swimsuit emblazoned with fluorescent orange streaks. I look like a tiger. I was kind of hoping they'd send me a green suit (since in high school, our school color was green and I've only owned green suits) or a blue suit (go Bears!). But okay, you get what you paid for.

Anyways, that's not the point of my blog post.

On Monday, K and I conferred with the therapist and decided we were going to stop pushing the goggles thing. So we just played the entire hour--on noodles, with a kickboard, with little toys. E loves to have water in his mouth. I'm not sure if he drinks it or not, but he's always filling his mouth with warm pool water and letting it dribble out (or once, spitting it in my face). I'm trying to teach him how to blow bubbles so he can hold his breath.

As part of an exercise, we dropped sinking toys to the bottom of the shallow end and had E try to dive for them. At first he cheated by using his toes to hook the little green seahorse. But then we dived as an example, and he followed! He needed to hold onto our arms for leverage, though. Which is a great first step, if you ask me. In a moment of unthinking, I took my own goggles from my face and put them on E's. Just the suction cup part, not the strap. He held them on tightly and plopped his face in the water. It was magical. I shouted to K, who had looked away for a minute. We high-fived and laughed like schoolchildren (K is a grown man). My goggles are tinted and mirrored, so I couldn't tell if E was opening his eyes underwater or not. But he is starting to get comfortable with the idea of goggles on his face! Next week's goal will be getting the strap on--which I'm told might be a scary situation for E, since he already doesn't like the sensation of things on his face. The progress continues.

It's odd to think that little things such as these are "progress." Perhaps I am just good at romanticizing trivialities. This program is teaching me that there is beauty regardless.

SNAP Mondays | Between walls

At this very moment, I am slightly annoyed that my internet in my apartment hasn’t been working for the last two days. I didn’t mind it yesterday because I was home for all of thirty waking minutes. But right now, I’m trying to study for an English literature midterm (which is tomorrow) and it makes looking up references nearly impossible. I’ve tried fixing the problem in a plethora of ways, but I’ve now given up. This blog was made possible by Microsoft Word, a brief moment of grace, and a fleeting connection. 

I haven’t blogged for a while about SNAP, because we observed Indigenous Peoples day two Mondays ago (known to me as Columbus Day for the first 21 years of my life). But last Monday, K and I think we made some progress with E, who has been averse to wearing goggles since Day One. The only word I’ve heard him say is “No,” and that was the reply to my asking if he wanted to wear a pair of neon green goggles. The head therapist said that it would be a goal to introduce him to just the idea of wearing them, since it’s not uncommon for children with his condition to dislike things on or around their faces. E is very willing to dive underwater—and usually ends up rubbing his eyes a lot due to the chlorine. So one of our new games is the Goggle Wearing Game, in which K and I both gush about how great goggles are while looking through them at E, and then putting our faces in the water. It sounds kind of silly, but a lot of what we do sounds silly. We are also trying to teach E how to kick. We can usually get E to balance on his belly on a noodle with K holding it, and then letting it go. I wait with outstretched hands about five feet away, and encourage E to come towards me. He laughs and splashes the entire way, and when he does reach me, he puts his forehead on mine. 

These are just a few of the great moments in SNAP. I think I mostly tell people about those parts as encouragement, but of course, there are some not so great moments either. Like how I sometimes get accosted by thuggish high schoolers on the way to the pool, how I always need to run to my IV leaders meetings from Milvia in about ten minutes, or how I wake up in the middle of the night because I am so dehydrated from the warm pool. 

But hey, we take risks to do things that we love.

Okay, if I can talk about more personal things for a minute. Lately I’ve had moment of intense sadness because my best friends feel very far away from me. For the first time in a while, my support system has been shaken—no, ravaged. I’m usually the person who checks up on people, who sends that random text or message, who makes an extra effort to catch up. This semester I’ve been busier than normal, with less time for meals and people in general. But I realized yesterday that friendship is a two-way street, and I can’t always be the person running after someone. I think the nature of sin is that it makes a person selfish, which is true for me at this very moment because I don’t want to give more of myself. There is only so much unrequited effort I can muster, and it is running dry. Also, if I already feel empty when it comes to friendships, why would I ever want a relationship? 

I think a lot of it has to do with the way I appear to others. Put-together, on top of things, “Nothing phases you,” a friend said to me on Monday. “You take everything in stride.” That’s my defense mechanism at work. The part of me that assures me that I don’t need anybody to motivate me, to appease me, to satisfy me. The part of me that shuts out emotions and uses disappointment as fuel for my work ethic. The part of me that says “Being close to people means giving them control, and you must protect yourself to make sure that must never happens.”

I’ve spent years building this wall. I wonder if it can ever come down.

SNAP Mondays | Special Needs Aquatics Program

Today was my first day with SNAP, or Special Needs Aquatic Program, which is held at Berkeley Warm Pool. I got trained for it yesterday, both in therapeutic technical information and actually simulating in the water. During the whole orientation, I wanted to cry. There was just something about the way the director spoke of the children who attend this program that moved me to tears. The whole program's mission is centered around the equalizing nature of water. I've never thought much about the therapeutic nature of swimming, because swimming on a team in high school meant winning championships, becoming fit, making friends, building discipline, becoming a faster swimmer. Everyone was doing it to achieve some sort of mainstream goal.

Humor me for a minute. Think about your posture, right now. You are probably sitting in a chair, with your arms stretched in front of you at your laptop. Your back and abdominal muscles are engaged, your spine is holding your head up. If your roommate calls, you can turn your head and answer. If you drop something, you can bend over and pick it up. We have so much mobility that we take for granted.

Not so with the SNAP kids. Most of the children have mild to severe motor and cognitive disabilities. But when they are in the water, they are released into the world of possibility and mobility.

My child, E, is seven years old and the most active bundle of energy I have ever had the pleasure of meeting. Before he even got into the water, he eagerly tore off his clothes (with the help of his mother) and waded towards the steps to the pool. He dipped his toes in, splashed around, and squealed loudly. His mother had told me that he doesn't talk much, but can understand if I speak slowly and repetitively to him. He can put his face in the water, and he knows how to float. I didn't ask much else other than the usual safety precautions and limitations; we aren't told his disability, so as to not pigeonhole his abilities. I think it's a great policy, and it will be great to discover the child's own personality and needs.

For some unknown reason, I was the only unpaired helper, and E was the only strong-swimming SNAP kid.

We started off with a pendulum, which basically means holding him under his armpits and rocking him side by side (I almost said laterally, darned IB131L) to get him used to the feeling of water. He quickly tired of that, squirmed away from my grasp, and dove underwater to grab my legs. E also loves to splash and scream. The other helpers had a look of sympathy on their faces as they gently floated around their quiet four-year old girls with more severe muscle weakness, but I had so much fun!

I don't think I've ever intentionally sucked in 91-degree pool water to spit it out as a game, had my face sneezed on, played peekaboo underwater, or been kissed by a little boy standing on my legs.

Okay that all sounds incredibly unsanitary, but whatever. It's a pool. It's a program. I'm hoping my immune system will support me in this. I think I already love this.

God is so good in pouring into me so I can pour into others.