The surf school empowering young Sri Lankan women

On the south coast of Sri Lan­ka, under the ample shade of a Wetakeiya tree, a group of local young women are sit­ting in the sand learn­ing about ocean safe­ty. On their laps are book­lets writ­ten half in Eng­lish and half in the ornate loop­ing curls of Sin­halese, the most wide­ly spo­ken lan­guage on the island, to help facil­i­tate their learn­ing. A few metres away, small begin­ner-friend­ly waves break gen­tly just beyond the shoreline.

The group are part of a pro­gramme run by the social enter­prise Sea­Sis­ters at the pop­u­lar beach town of Weliga­ma. The train­ing com­bines prac­ti­cal swim and surf instruc­tion in the water with edu­ca­tion­al ses­sions on the beach.

In keep­ing with the set­ting, the lessons are relaxed and inter­ac­tive, but their con­tent is impor­tant, espe­cial­ly in a coun­try where few chil­dren are taught to swim and on a coast­line where the 2004 tsuna­mi – which killed more than 30,000 Sri Lankans – casts a long psy­cho­log­i­cal shad­ow when it comes to feel­ing con­fi­dent in the water.

Kalpa Gand­hari, the pro­gramme man­ag­er of Sea­Sis­ters, was a young child when the tsuna­mi hit but she still remem­bers peo­ple scream­ing and run­ning away from the beach in ter­ror. She grew up near the ocean, in a town called Unawatu­na, but nev­er learnt how to swim because her schools, like most in the coun­try, had no access to a swim­ming pool.

Kalpa liked the idea of the ocean or ​“bath” as she says Sri Lankans call it in Sin­halese, but at 25, she thought she’d missed the boat in terms of learn­ing to swim. ​“I had lots of fears, and I’m not some­one who learns things quick­ly,” she says, but when she joined Sea­Sis­ters, ini­tial­ly as a trans­la­tor, she took part in the train­ing pro­gramme and the expe­ri­ence was trans­for­ma­tive. ​“It was the per­fect place for me to be as a slow learn­er. Nobody was judg­ing me, and the envi­ron­ment was very calm,” she says.

Once she began feel­ing more com­fort­able in the water, she took up surf­ing through Sea­Sis­ters, a sport which she’d seen a lot grow­ing up, but nev­er once imag­ined she’d get to try. ​“Surf­ing here was only for tourists and boys from coastal vil­lages,” she says. ​“It was very male-dom­i­nat­ed; nobody thought women could do it. Sea­Sis­ters has been real­ly good at chang­ing that mindset.”

Sea­Sis­ters was found­ed in 2018 by Mar­ti­na Burtsch­er, from Aus­tria, and Aman­da Prifti from the US. Mar­ti­na first vis­it­ed Sri Lan­ka in 2017, when she was writ­ing her master’s the­sis on ​“the poten­tial of surf­ing for women’s empow­er­ment”. She’d heard about a group called Girls Make Waves, who were offer­ing surf lessons to women in Arugam Bay, a famous surf spot on the east coast of the island, to help diver­si­fy the line-up.

“I realised these women face so many bar­ri­ers in surf­ing, and I want­ed to look more deeply into it,” says Mar­ti­na. After fin­ish­ing her the­sis, she returned to Sri Lan­ka with the idea of set­ting up a women’s surf club on the south coast, team­ing up with Aman­da, who she met by chance while sell­ing her surfboard.

From the begin­ning they worked to cre­ate a safe space, not just for the women but also for their fam­i­lies, ​“for the wives’, daugh­ters, and sis­ters, as the fam­i­ly con­text is very impor­tant in Sri Lan­ka,” Mar­ti­na says. ​“We wore leg­gings and T‑shirts to respect and not break the cul­tur­al norms,” she says.

Six girls came to that first les­son, and Mar­ti­na says it was clear from the start they real­ly want­ed to surf. Through word of mouth, news of the pro­gramme spread. ​“The girls went back and told their com­mu­ni­ties and then their moth­ers also joined us,” she says. ​“We nev­er did any adver­tis­ing, and though we did have a social media pres­ence, those fol­low­ers were not real­ly the women who came from the rur­al areas.”

I ask Kalpa if she was sur­prised there wasn’t more resis­tance local­ly? ​“Some­times a hus­band or par­ents might come to ask ques­tions and see what’s hap­pen­ing, but it was more because they were curi­ous than any­thing neg­a­tive,” she says. “[Surf­ing] is not in their vocab­u­lary, espe­cial­ly for the old­er generation.”

With sup­port from the local com­mu­ni­ty, inter­na­tion­al tourists, and women from dif­fer­ent parts of the coun­try began to take an inter­est. ​“We had an Insta­gram account, where we post­ed pic­tures of surf­ing, includ­ing pho­tos of women in saris, and women from all over Sri Lan­ka were tex­ting us and say­ing: ​‘Oh wow I didn’t know Sri Lankan women could actu­al­ly surf.’ Because if you nev­er see it, you don’t know you can do it. It real­ly cre­at­ed this momentum.”

They hoped to use surf­ing as a tool for social change, and to edu­cate par­tic­i­pants about ocean safe­ty and envi­ron­men­tal and gen­der issues. ​“After the tri­al, we want­ed to try and make it a sus­tain­able thing,” she says, ​“so we start­ed to devel­op our own method­olo­gies to work with vol­un­teers and see if we could estab­lish some­thing with longevi­ty, so the women would real­ly have the chance to learn how to surf.”

Mar­ti­na and Aman­da quick­ly realised there was no point in teach­ing surf­ing to women who couldn’t swim so they incor­po­rat­ed swim­ming into their pro­gramme, and though Covid enforced a two-year pause on their plans, they are now ful­ly up and run­ning with swim and surf lessons tak­ing place every Sat­ur­day from Novem­ber to April, align­ing with the local surf sea­son, with around 20 young women, rang­ing in ages from 12 – 55 attend­ing each ses­sion. They also run larg­er com­mu­ni­ty dis­cus­sion-based events in the off sea­son with guest speak­ers and a more advanced surf instruc­tor train­ing course.

From the begin­ning, the pair sought to embrace local gov­er­nance, with the idea that many of the young women who went through the pro­gramme would go on to become instruc­tors them­selves and maybe even pro­fes­sion­al surfers.

“We want­ed local lead­er­ship from the start,” says Mar­ti­na, ​“and to cre­ate eco­nom­ic oppor­tu­ni­ties with­in the Sea­Sis­ters. It was vol­un­teer-based at first, but now we have two full-time employ­ees, Kalpa, and Thamali Dil­shani, who works on our mer­chan­dise line. And we’ve recent­ly brought on board Udani Hewa­mad­du­ma, a 24-year-old Sri Lankan marine sci­en­tist, to work as an ocean edu­ca­tor part-time.”

The pat­tern for the class­es is swim­ming and surf­ing lessons, fol­lowed by the par­tic­i­pants all meet­ing in a cir­cle for the edu­ca­tion side of things, under­pinned by the book­lets to incor­po­rate lan­guage learn­ing for both local peo­ple and for­eign vol­un­teers into the framework.

The vol­un­teers and par­tic­i­pants talk about rip cur­rents and oth­er ocean haz­ards, learn beach life­sav­ing skills, and how to stay safe, and in time they also dis­cuss more sen­si­tive top­ics such as women’s health and menstruation.

It’s always been impor­tant for Mar­ti­na to use the class­es as a tool for envi­ron­men­tal learn­ing in a coun­try where plas­tic pol­lu­tion is a huge and grow­ing prob­lem. ​“You can’t take a step on the street or a beach with­out see­ing plas­tic – it’s every­where,” she says, ​“and it’s impor­tant to talk about that. What kind of mate­r­i­al is it? Why is it there? What does it do to the ani­mals and ocean and how can we reduce it?”

The hope is that the women will take the ocean pro­tec­tion book­lets home from their ses­sion, and these will spark con­ver­sa­tions in their fam­i­lies that will even­tu­al­ly lead more peo­ple to be inspired to take action. ​“If you’re dis­con­nect­ed from the ocean, you might nev­er think about it but when you’re in the ocean and see­ing trash float­ing around or sea tur­tles dying because of plas­tic pol­lu­tion it goes deep into your heart and it becomes more nat­ur­al to pro­tect it,” she says.

Kalpa agrees there is a lack of knowl­edge and aware­ness of envi­ron­men­tal issues in the coun­try. ​“Peo­ple here sim­ply don’t have the capac­i­ty to think about it because they are strug­gling with their day-to-day lives and think­ing about how they’re going to sur­vive. Most peo­ple can’t think: ​‘Oh I’m con­sum­ing this poly­thene or what should I do with this bag?’” she says.

Kalpa her­self start­ed to become envi­ron­men­tal­ly engaged through Sea­Sis­ters, and a vol­un­teer once said to her: ​“You could use a reusable bot­tle, you don’t need to use a plas­tic water bot­tle.” Small things, she says, which you don’t know if you’ve nev­er been taught.

She believes they’re already notic­ing a pos­i­tive impact from rais­ing these issues with young women on their cours­es. ​“Peo­ple do become more respon­si­ble, and we have to active­ly do more to encour­age this kind of change,” she says. ​“In my vil­lage for exam­ple, we have a year­ly fes­ti­val for sev­en days on the beach, and there is always lots of rub­bish after­wards. But this year, there was a beach clean run by locals and that makes me hap­py that peo­ple are start­ing to think about it.”

For Mar­ti­na, envi­ron­men­tal edu­ca­tion is now the main goal of Sea­Sis­ters and recruit­ing Udani Hewa­mad­du­ma as an ocean edu­ca­tor has been key. ​“She has the ambi­tion to help shift that mind­set around envi­ron­men­tal pro­tec­tion in local com­mu­ni­ties and also among tourists,” says Mar­ti­na, who are of course a big part of the prob­lem. ​“For­eign tourists con­sume a lot more than Sri Lankan fam­i­lies do.”

Last year, they start­ed a project called The Sea­Sis­ters Expe­ri­ence Day, to edu­cate tourists on what the social enter­prise does and to encour­age them to be more con­scious of their envi­ron­men­tal impact while on holiday.

And what about the line-up? I ask Mar­ti­na if it’s become more diverse since Sea­Sis­ters start­ed, but she thinks it’s too soon to say. ​“If you com­pare when I first vis­it­ed in 2017 to 2023, I can def­i­nite­ly see dif­fer­ences,” she says. ​“Part­ly because of Sea­Sis­ters but also there are more Sri Lankan women from [the cap­i­tal] Colom­bo, who still face bar­ri­ers but might have a high­er socio-eco­nom­ic back­ground to women from the south.”

“Some of the women from our pro­grammes have start­ed to surf by them­selves but that’s the minor­i­ty,” she says, though they are proud of one of their young women who became one of the first surf instruc­tors on the south coast. ​“So many women come to us to over­come their fears and trau­ma around the ocean, and they’re hap­py just to com­plete the pro­gramme,” she says.

For Kalpa, the ben­e­fits of her expe­ri­ence in the water with Sea­Sis­ters go even fur­ther. ​“It’s not just about know­ing the ocean is a place for me. It’s also shown me that I can do big things in my life. I can show up, step out of my com­fort zone, and things will change. We live on an island and most of us nev­er leave the island, but my life feels broad­er and less lim­it­ed now.”

Find out more about Sea­Sis­ters here. 

This piece appeared in Huck #80. Get your copy here.

Enjoyed this arti­cle? Like Huck on Face­book or fol­low us on Twit­ter.

Sup­port sto­ries like this by becom­ing a mem­ber of Club Huck.