Last July, 1995 an SOS Expedition Team landed in the Honduran Miskito Coast to deliver emergency Medical equipment and to provide training. Join our project or support us with with cash and or equipment donations. Be a part of our expedition. We are working on finishing Honduras and start work on the Nicaragua project.
Cruelly, when he was the victim, he saw that his shipmates feared the captain; so they continue to dive until the ship's quota of lobster was filled. Too late for a recompression chamber to revive his dead legs. He stared past me into empty space, eyes misting over, chin high. I turned my camera from him, out of respect. Here was epic maritime exploitation, unsurpassed through history.
As this weight fell upon me, I realized that if this brutality went on unchallenged, my view of humanity would sink. In early March, 1995. an SOS emergency medical expedition consisting of Miskito Indian divers, 14 yr. old Caleb Windship Izdepski and his dad,Bob Izdepski, (Publisher of Universal Diver Magazine), manually cast overboard, floated , then dragged a 4000 lb. recompression chamber 12 miles to the Moravian Mission Clinic in Kalquira, on the Miskito Coast of Honduras. Motivation came from the news that one third of the 120 divers living there have been paralyzed by the "bends" (we have video).
Recently, as new diving technologies have impacted uneducated coastal indigenous people the world over, tens of thousands of men and boys have been killed or paralyzed in diving fisheries. The social and economic consequences are staggering. In June of '94, Robert Izdepski addressed the international meeting of the Undersea and Hyperbaric Medical Society and showed the SOS video(courtesy of Jorge Torrez, winner of the World Press International award for photographic arts) to a shocked audience that showed it's support with honors and by a special Society donation.
Sub Ocean safety, has produced simple solutions to these environmental/social problems, solutions not only feasible, but which made economic fishing sense to the Honduran lobster fleet; a fleet that now supports SOS. The Honduran experience has uniquely prepared SOS to bring emergency medical aid, commercial diving education, and sustainable fisheries planning to the rest of the world. To ignore the critical significance of diving fisheries to the world's diving infrastructure, is to be blind to an encroaching threat; human rights and morality aside.
The idea that "They are only Indians without money who don't live near us", deserves no comment. Our world is not compartmentalized and that "Indians" may well be your next dive guide/instructor. Unsafe diving is a contagious environmental disease, curable only with a holistic and unprejudiced approach.
Join with our expeditions, help us to where we cannot go, contribute to our plans, share the risks and breathe the rewards. SOS can win battles; help us win the war. We value individual support and offer membership for $25, video for $50. Corporate support is needed and we offer publicity in return. You might feel better about life. Help us get this message out to the concerned. Please contact us with your support and PLEASE POST WHERE APPROPRIATE.
Jorge Giraldez-Benard de Granada, Nicaragua
Editor, Sea Frontiers
Email: seafront@oj.rsmas.miami.edu.