Healing Waters, Helping Hands
Two Catholic school teachers change lives by sharing the sport they love
By Rich Reece
A brown-haired boy, maybe nine or ten years old, is standing unsteadily on a surfboard, riding the foam off Wrightsville Beach, NC. As he makes it to shore he grins and raises his hands in triumph.
On the beach, a thirty-something couple are hugging each other, tears running down their faces. The boy is their son, and he’s blind.
The young family arrived at this moment thanks to a life changing outreach begun by two teachers at St. Mary Catholic School in Wilmington. Three years ago, Jack Viorel and Kevin Murphy had classrooms across the hall from each other. During breaks, they’d talk about their twin passions: teaching and surfing.
“We both wanted to use surfing for outreach,” Viorel says. The two started a surfing school called Indo Jax. “We did charity camps whenever we could,” Viorel explains, “for Boys and Girls Clubs, for at risk and medically fragile kids and adults, and the charity caught on so big that we separated it from the business. We called it Ocean Cure, and funded it using the profits from Indo Jax and donations of equipment and time from other surfers.”
Today the Ocean Cure schedule is enormous, and reaches men, women and especially children facing a broad range of challenges: difficult home lives, visual impairment, Type 1 diabetes, autism, AIDS and cerebral palsy, to name a few. Ocean Cure assists at retreats for the Wounded Warriors Project for veterans transitioning into civilian life after suffering physical and emotional combat injuries. They have worked with the Life Rolls On Foundation, a division of the Christopher & Dana Reeve Foundation, to improves the quality of life for young people affected by spinal cord injury. Ocean Cure has been involved in Special Olympics and gone to India to teach surfing to orphans. Since March 2009, the organization has donated more than $20,000 in camps and equipment.
Both Viorel and Murphy attest to the unique power of the ocean to soothe the disabled. “You see an autistic child,” Viorel says, “who may be kicking, screaming and resisting, but as soon as they’re in the water they become calm. The mother of a nine-year-old autistic son says surfing made him “a different child.”
“He loves the water,” she said. “It’s become his therapy. It’s raised his self esteem.” Tearing up a little, she continues, “You know, we loved him, we hugged him, we disciplined him, but I don’t think we truly knew him before this. It brought him out of himself, it let us see his beautiful personality.”
Viorel recalls a blind child in one of the camps who seemed to feel the movement of the waves and adjust naturally. “I can only imagine what the experience of surfing feels like to a sightless person,” he says. “But he was doing things by feel that you would usually need to teach a sighted person.”
Desmond is a young man who was training for the military when he began having fainting spells. It turned out he was diabetic. After the diagnosis and treatment he hoped to return to his training. On the drive back to the base, his blood sugar plummeted suddenly and he passed out. The car flipped three times and hit a tree. Desmond’s neck was broken, leaving him a paraplegic. He came to Ocean Cure through the Life Rolls On Foundation, where he has learned to surf prone and now wants to spend “every chance I get” in the ocean.
“It’s the really profound changes you see in people that keeps us saying yes to these camps,” Jack Viorel says. “We can really help change lives.”
Asked about the high points in his work with Ocean Cure, Kevin Murphy laughs and says, “High points? About a million. Every time we do a camp we look at each other when it’s over and say, ‘Wow, that was the best camp ever!’”
Viorel adds, “It’s definitely a high point when you hear from parents whose kids have been excluded, who felt like they didn’t fit in, and they come to you and say, ‘My child has a place now. He can call himself a surfer, something that makes him ‘cool’ and proud.”
Both Viorel and Murphy credit their Catholic upbringing and education with instilling in them the desire to serve others. Viorel attended a Catholic high school in California where “community service and giving back to others was just ground into us. You could not graduate from that school without thinking about how you could help other people.”
Kevin Murphy grew up in New York and attended St. Bonaventure University, founded by the Franciscans. “I developed a strong desire there to help out the environment,” he says. “If I’m going to use the ocean, the natural world, for free, then I’m obligated to take care of it.” This message is very much a part of Ocean Cure. The group conducts a number of environmental programs where children pick up trash on the beaches to earn boards or lessons.
“The ocean can heal people,” Murphy explains. “In return, we need to heal the ocean.”
Viorel agrees. “Our goal is to uplift spirits, build self esteem, show youngsters new things, ,but also to get them involved in nature so that they appreciate it and as they get older try to do something to protect it.”
Both men also credit Father Bob Kus, Pastor of St. Mary, with encouraging them to make an idea into a reality. “When we told him about this,” Viorel recalls, “he really pushed us to follow through. He’s always preaching that no matter how unusual your talent is, you are called to use it to help others.”
Viorel recently returned from Kochi, India, where he conducted a surfing camp for 25 girls and young women, ages 4-21, from a Catholic orphanage. “It was special,” he says. “As a father of two daughters, it was so hard to fathom that these girls were forgotten and considered worthless in their society. Yet they were smart, artistic, kind… After the camp, it was uplifting to see them so happy, but then when I left I thought ‘What happens now?’ I really think we can’t get back there soon enough.
“But it hit me that this sort of situation isn’t just in India. We have so much work yet to do.”
An unexpected benefit of the surfers’ outreach has been on the young people around them, in their families and their classrooms. “The students at St. Mary’s see it, and they’re eager to help,” Murphy says. “We had an event where they interacted with autistic kids. The kids were hesitant at first, but before long they were playing, singing, dancing.”
Jack Viorel tells how his 6-year-old daughter, on learning about January’s earthquake in Haiti, asked him, “Are you and Kevin going to go there and show them how to surf?”
Ocean Cure still operates on money from Indo Jax and on donations. “The donations aren’t a big part right now,” Viorel says, “but we’re hoping they’ll increase.” The program began with volunteer instructors, but the schedule got so heavy that the volunteers would get burnt out. So the program now uses paid, certified instructors. Insurance is a big cost. The surf boards they use are soft, so as not to hurt the novice surfers, but as a result they’re fragile and need to be replaced regularly.
Viorel and Murphy aren’t worried, though. “When you see the courage of these kids, and then how much fun they have, fun that maybe they don’t have in other parts of their lives, and when you see their parents…” Viorel says, and pauses for a second. “My dream would be to do these camps all year round.”
The motto of Ocean Cure is “You Me We.” Kevin Murphy says that’s a lesson the kids and adults in the program take with them: “We all have to take whatever we have, and use it to help each other.”
How You Can Help
For more information on how you can help support Ocean Cure with donations or supplies, or to inquire about surf camps, go to http://indojaxsurfschool.com/outreach.php. The Ocean Cure Office is at 607 N Lake Park, Carolina Beach, NC 28428. Telephone 910. 458.7100.