Three children from Kwa-Thema Extension four (4) enjoy swimming in an unsafe small dirty dam that is located next to the Rietfontein disposal.
Drowning is the number one cause of unintentional deaths for children ranging from 1-4 years of age. It is the second leading cause of accidental deaths for children ranging from 5-14 years of age and the third leading cause of unintended injury deaths for children who from 15-19 years of age, as well as for children under 1.
When you are a child you do things without thinking of the outcome, we all want to enjoy and make things that make us happy. Implementing water safety educational courses will vastly help to prevent fatal drowning situations and it will also help children to be basically cautious around wet lands. Water safety measures should be taught in life orientation classes at a school. The main factors that contribute to drowning ordeals, is the inability of swimming, lack of barriers to prevent unsupervised water access, lack of close supervision while swimming, failure to wear life jackets, alcohol use, and seizure disorders.
The most common location to cause toddler drowning deaths are dams. However there are other men made water sources like troughs, water tanks and swimming pools which claim lives. One of the community members Anna Mahlangu said. “Most of the time we don’t permit the children to go to dams, however we know that there’s a dam at back of our houses were cows go and drink water, we suspect that there are snakes in that area, we try earnestly to prevent the children from going to that area, but they don’t listen. we can’t wait for schools to open because now we must monitor them the whole day and some of their parents are working; the was a community swimming pool at the Complex sport ground where they normally went, but now it’s closed due to Covid-19. That dam is not safe at all I don’t know what we can do to prevent this.”
The parents are advised to look after their kids and make sure that they know where they are playing and compulsorily check on them each and every time.
By Vusumuzi Makwakwa
