A few years ago, I was responsible for some very modest fund-raising on behalf of Sub Ocean Safety, an organization working to alleviate the suffering of lobster divers in Honduras and Nicaragua. In supplying the likes of Darden's Red Lobster restaurants and SYSCO's institutional customers, the indigenous divers of Central America are spending dangerous amounts of time at extreme depths using woefully inadequate SCUBA gear without the benefit of even the most fundamental diver training. The results, aside from cheap lobster dinners in the first world, include Decompression Sickness (DCS) and Arterial Gas Embolism (AGE) symptoms in essentially 100% of those fourth world divers. The only medical cure for DCS/AGE is hyperbaric treatments and Sub Ocean Safety has been working for more than a decade to install operational hyperbaric chambers in remote coastal areas where they are accessible to the injured divers. In 2002, more than 1,000 commercial lobster divers were treated in hyperbaric chambers located on the Atlantic coast of Nicaragua and Honduras.
As a result of my fund-raising efforts, I've had a standing invitation to join Bob Izdepski, president of Sub Ocean Safety, on one of his trips to Central America. When he notified me (on February 4) of a sudden opportunity ("meet in Managua on February 11"), I jumped on it and, in the process, entered into the whirlwind that is Bob-on-a-mission.
The purpose of the trip was multi-faceted. First and foremost was to round up funding for a hyperbaric chamber thought to be sitting in a warehouse on Big Corn Island off Nicaragua's coast. The original plan was to corral Jorge Morgan, head of the largest lobster processing business in Nicaragua, in hopes of securing the funds needed to make the chamber operational.
A second purpose was to visit and check on the status of the chambers installed along the coast.
A third purpose was to give a New York journalist (Mark Jacobson) and a Magnum agency photographer (Alex Webb) an opportunity to investigate Bob, Sub Ocean Safety and their Central American efforts.
In the end, all three objectives were met with flying colors; how we ended up at that result, however, involved a long, circuitous path that hardly ever followed any plan that was more than a few hours to a day old. The name of the game was speed-adaptability-flexibility.
My own participation started with instructions from Bob to try to meet him "poolside at the Best Western across the street from the Managua airport between 8:00 and 9:00PM on February 11." If, somehow, we failed to connect in Managua, I was instructed to hole-up on Big Corn Island (where?) and, hopefully (?!?), he'd catch up with me a day or two later.
In this and many other ways, Bob comes across differently than just about anyone else you're likely to encounter. It's almost immediately clear to anyone who corresponds with or talks to Bob that he's not shy about blowing his own horn or that of Sub Ocean Safety's work. Some part of my motivation for joining this trip was to learn firsthand if Bob really has much worth blowing that horn about.
I have gone into great detail elsewhere chronicling what happened during this trip on a daily basis. By that account, it's clear that Bob's expectations far outstrip what I would consider both laudable and achievable. It's equally clear that his expectations set the tone and pace of a trip that, in the end, met and exceeded everybody's expectations.
Without repeating the long account, let me summarize the major achievements of this 12-day trip:
- By repetitively adapting our travel plans and schedules during the first week, we twice met with Sia. Margarita Guardian, Nicaragua's Vice-Minister of Health. As a result of those meetings, Sia. Guardian committed to funding the transport and installation of a Sub Ocean Safety chamber in Bluefields, Nicaragua.
- We participated in meetings where a Nicaraguan civil rights lawyer conveyed essential labor law information to the leaders of two Moskito diver unions.
- We collected information through interviews and videotaping that expose the intentional ignorance and lies behind claims made by major American corporations that they do not deal in diver-caught lobster.
- We documented evidence of SYSCO's business association with a processing plant on Big Corn Island that processes diver-caught lobster.
- We visited the diver clinic and chamber at Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua, meeting with Dr. Humberto Castro Olayo and dozens of paralyzed divers.
- We found, in Puerto Cabezas, the Sub Ocean Safety chamber that Jorge Morgan had agreed to move to Corn Island more than six months ago.
- We reviewed the materials and presentation in Puerto Cabezas of the subset of PADI's Open Water I and Red Cross First Aid Course materials being taught, for the first time, to leaders of the Nicaraguan divers, boat captains and processing plant managers.
- Sub Ocean Safety's efforts and concerns were covered by LaPrensa, the Nicaraguan national newspaper, as well as radio and television.
- We visited the diver clinic and chamber at Calquira, Honduras to find that the facility had been effectively closed by FUDENA the preceding October.
- We serendipitously met with a representative of FUDENA (and the Rotary Club members he was escorting) who happened to be visiting the Calquira clinic while we were there.
- We met with and interviewed a group of disabled divers living in Calquira.
- We solicited, on behalf of a disabled diver, the assistance of an American surgeon who was temporarily working in Honduras as part of an International Health Service team.
- We met with a Sub Ocean Safety-sponsored, Moskito women's rights organization based in Puerto Lempira, Honduras.
- We interviewed operators of the two chambers (Anthony's Key and Fantasy Island) on the Honduran island of Roatan, to get an update on the numbers of divers they treat: 6 - 7 recreational divers per year versus 700+ lobster divers per year.
Necessarily missing from that summary are the daily, sometimes hourly, revisions to our itineraries as we adapted to new developments, the hour-to-hour adventures of cross-country travel by small plane, over-crowded bus, dug-out canoe, panga, ferry and 4WD pickup truck, the break-of-dawn beginnings Bob insisted on almost every day, penny-pinching budgeting and synergism of the teamwork between Bob and his Central American partner, Juan Alejandros Samuel, president of Sub Ocean Safety - Central America.
Also missing are words adequate at conveying the graphic understanding I gained from this trip on the depth of need in that part of the world, the looks of misery, pain and confusion on the faces of hospitalized divers recently paralyzed, the heartbreakingly desperate and personal pleas for help and hope frequently voiced by recovering divers struggling to adapt to their lowered social and financial status and the utter lack of alternatives in the under-developed Moskito Coast areas of Nicaragua and Honduras. It's an arena where there are very few tangible signs that either governmental or non-governmental organizations make much of a difference and where SubOceanSafety is a well-recognized and appreciated exception in that regard.
So, in answer to my initial question about Sub Ocean Safety and its leader, I returned quite comfortable knowing that, yes, they are the real deal.
Last Modified: March 13, 2003
© 2003 Rocky Daniels
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