𝐀 𝐅𝐈𝐑𝐒𝐓 𝐒𝐂𝐔𝐁𝐀 𝐃𝐈𝐕𝐄. 𝐀𝐍 𝐄𝐋𝐃𝐄𝐑 𝐁𝐑𝐎𝐓𝐇𝐄𝐑 𝐀𝐒 𝐀 𝐆𝐔𝐈𝐃𝐄.
Piet—our Yaf Keru team leader—guided his younger brother through his first ever scuba dive (video at end).
Just a few days ago, his brother Yance joined our team, to follow in Piet’s footsteps in the Yaf Keru Reef Restoration and Conservation program.
Today, he saw the coral garden he’s heard about for years. The one Piet has poured his energy into. The one he’s helped build with his own hands, fragment by fragment.
Yance completed his skills, more relaxed than your average DSD/Open Water student. He watched Cory and Yos transplanting coral onto stabilised substrate. He hovered, observing, taking it all in. For the first time, he saw it, and began to understand what it meant.
Then—after a demonstration, and under the calm, watchful eye of Piet—he transplanted his very first coral fragment.
This is what we mean when we say reef restoration is more than ecological recovery—it’s about connection, pride, and generational shift.
Like many here, Yance has spent much of his life in the sea. He’s been at depths most recreational divers would never attempt. Without scuba gear. Without formal training or safety equipment. It’s part of a local reality we don’t often talk about—one shaped not by choice, but by limited opportunity.
But this dive was different.
For the first time, he descended with guidance—with safety. He was introduced to the concepts of pressure, buoyancy, and dive computers—the kind of critical safety knowledge that, for many young adults in the region who have only ever known compressor fishing or other unsafe methods as ‘normal diving,’ is either completely unknown, or worse – out of reach.
And Piet? He stood steady, confident, and calm. Leading not just our team, but his own younger brother.
Two and a half years ago, Piet was taking his first steps with us. Today, he’s the one leading. The one passing on knowledge. The one shaping a different path.
This is what Yaf Keru is really about.
It’s about restoration—not only of coral, but of opportunity. It’s about building livelihoods that heal instead of harm. About creating space for local leadership to rise, and for younger generations to step into something safer, deeper, and more sustainable.
It’s about two brothers on a dive. The elder guiding the younger into a world he’s always known – but never seen like this.
This is the power of community-based reef restoration.
Welcome Yance.
And thank you Piet.
(Side note… we didn’t include any footage of the pre-dive briefing, delivered so well by Piet. This briefing was filmed on an iPhone… which shortly afterwards… fell in the sea and is now hopefully recovering in a tupperware of rice, in the dry cabinet…#justanotherday)
More about our approach to capacity building here: https://theseapeople.org/capacity-building-and-empowerment/
More about Dive Guards program here: https://theseapeople.org/yafkerudiveguards/