iStory: The New Rules of Swimming

iStory is a pilot project that empowers people with disabilities in Vietnam to tell their own story using social media. Equipped with only an iPod, participants tell their story through updates, pictures, and videos. See more stories at: go.onevietnam.org/istory/

“But the most significant derivation from the meaning of as ‘water’ is the concept of people who have gathered near a body of water to grow rice for one another, and founding a stable community, sharing rain and drought, plenty and famine, peace and war: from ‘water,’ its basic meaning, has come to designate ‘the homeland, the country, the nation.’ It is in this ultimate acception that the monosyllable nuoc reverberates through the deepest and farthest recesses of the Vietnamese collective unconscious and stirs there the most potent feelings. The nation’s fateful course, marked by ups and downs, is figuratively rendered as a ‘tide of water’ (van nuoc) with its ebb and flow. The highest virtue demanded of a Vietnamese is that he or she ‘love the nuoc‘ (yeu nuoc).” –Huynh Sanh Thong (no relation)

Grace.

The pirouette of a ballerina, spot-lit.

The ascent of smoke.

The ones who remain still, never oscillating in the heat of entropy’s dire context.

Real life, happening, everyday.

The cool ones.

The ones who have found other ways for propulsion because kicking harder has never solved the problems.

The ones who always forget they don’t have limbs and still find ways to move.

To master hydrodynamics, the lower body drafts behind the upper body – akin to why one should always stick your chest out, keep your head high.

It is not density, it is the lightness of the fuselage. So actually – to go hard – be light.

The swimmers from Ben Tre.

“There is no starting or stopping.”

There is water.

There is country.

There is impermanence.

There is them.

Setting the new rules of swimming.

 

Find out more about the Ben Tre Swim Team’s story at: http://onevietnam.org/swimteam