Rather than waiting to make an impact in the future, one high school senior is already making waves in his community. Swimmer and water polo athlete Roshan Ambegaonkar has turned a deeply personal experience into a powerful one – teaching young children about the importance of water safety. Roshan’s debut book, Water Safety with Bubbles the Buoy, blends together colorful character building with digestible water safety rules customized for young readers. However, this story goes beyond just a children’s book, but is based on Roshan’s first-hand encounters with calamity surrounding water.
Going back to first grade, Roshan witnessed a life or death situation where CPR and water safety played a significant role in saving the life of his classmate. After jumping into action and performing CPR on his classmate, thankfully, Roshan’s parents were able to successfully resuscitate his young classmate. Although this calamity ended safely, witnessing this event was life changing to Roshan, and prompted him to make a change.
Following this experience, Roshan joined a swim team. Involved on swim teams, he developed skills that not only taught him to excel as an athlete, but to become more aware of water safety and ensure the wellbeing of others around him in the pool. Today, Roshan continues to swim and participates in both the men’s swim and water polo team at Yorba Linda High School. Even as a high school athlete who is a strong swimmer and comfortable in the water, he still acknowledges that, “even strong swimmers like me and my teammates have to be careful, especially with horseplay and holding our breath too long under water”. Regardless of having years of experience in the water, accidents are prone to happen to anyone and can happen unexpectedly at any time.
Understanding the dangers of drowning, Roshan took his experience from being on swim and water polo teams, and became a certified lifeguard and Red Cross water safety ambassador. With his lifeguard and water safety credentials, Roshan took it upon himself to teach water safety principles throughout the community in hopes of keeping kids safe and preventing any avoidable drowning accidents within the local community.
Connor Duong (12), Roshan’s swim teammate, adds, “I’ve witnessed a couple events where kids have fallen into the pool or were having a difficult time in the deep end – it’s never not scary and I’m glad Roshan has written a book that can potentially save lives”. The gratitude and praise does not stop there; Roshan’s water polo teammate, Jay Cheng (12), remarks, “One of the first survival skills I was taught was how to swim. Even though I have been on the swim team for four years and have spent countless hours practicing, there are still moments that are scary. Roshan is a great teammate and I’m really glad that he wrote this children’s book that helps save lives. Drowning is extremely tragic and unfortunate, but in most cases it is very preventable, so I think that Roshan’s book will help spread this message.”
With over 4000 deaths in the United States each year, it has become the number one cause of death for children ages 1-14. In hopes of trying to prevent this common tragedy, Roshan took it into his own hands to prevent many of those deaths by spreading water safety education and published his children’s book, Water Safety with Bubbles the Buoy. Since Roshan was young, he has always wanted to write a children’s book about water safety to spread awareness, but it wasn’t until recently that he began pursuing this dream.
In the process of writing this book, Roshan found that the most important part was finding an engaging character. Because this is a book targeted at young children, it is vital that the attention of the children is captured by a bright and bubbly personality, which Roshan encapsulates with the character, Bubbles. Roshan also learned a lot about the process for copyright and publishing the book which he believes, weren’t really as complicated as he thought they would be.
For Roshan, the most difficult part of this process was collaborating with the illustrator. Initially, he wanted to illustrate the book, but did not have time and ended up working with his aunt to create the illustrations. This proved to be a challenging feat; the fifteen hour time difference between Roshan and his aunt living in Hong Kong delayed some of the process. Despite the obstacles, Roshan persisted in communicating with his aunt through late night FaceTime calls and exchanged text messages to coordinate the details. In the end, everything worked out.
The proceeds of this book are all dedicated towards water safety education. Having written this book in hopes of teaching water safety principles to children and to possibly save a life one day, Roshan hopes that families will learn rules that will help keep their kids safe and prevent drownings in the community.
