In Puerto Viejo, scuba diving was once just for tourists, but a centre is training young people with few opportunities to care for the ocean on their doorstep
“I put fresh almond leaves in your underwater masks as anti-fogging – a way to avoid using chemicals. You can remove them once in the water, just before diving,” says Salim Vasquez, 14, pushing her dreadlocks away from her mask.
She distributes the equipment to her fellow divers, who are aged between 14 and 24, and Ana María Arenas, a group coordinator. It is 8am on a cloudy Sunday morning in Puerto Viejo, a Jamaican-inspired city in the south of Costa Rica. The young conservationists are preparing to dive into the Caribbean water for their weekly reef monitoring.
Adir Garrido, Maitén Moore, Anumí Sassaroli, Esteban Gallo and Salim, as well as almost two dozen local divers, are part of the Ambassadors of the Sea Community Diving Centre, a non-profit organisation created in 2014 to provide opportunities for young people to do conservation work, such as seabed cleaning, reef monitoring, water pollution analysis, and underwater archaeology.
Supported by the United Nations Office for Project Services (Unops), the centre has so far offered 200 free training courses in open water and rescue diving, underwater archaeology, and coral monitoring to young people. There are some requirements to participate: getting good grades at school, learning to cook a Caribbean meal as a part of cultural preservation, carrying out beach cleaning, becoming a sea ambassador and fully participating in the centre’s activities.
More information: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jan/27/coral-crusaders-costa-ricas-young-divers-learn-to-protect-their-seas-aoe