WITH Mother's Day just around the corner, it seems appropriate that this week's interview is with Maggie Andriopoulos, mother of five. She is an inspiring example as to how women can be full time mothers for part of their lives, and then gradually incorporate part-time jobs that eventually develop into full-time careers once family demands are less. Andriopoulos is a well-known scuba diving instructor in Jeddah, a profession that fulfilled a childhood dream. She used to watch television documentaries filmed by Hans and Lottie Haas: “They were the pioneers of filming underwater and I just thought it was so exciting and glamorous – and there were animals that you had never seen. I have always loved water and been a swimmer, but we lived in the center of England and in those days it was expensive to dive.” After she was married, she lived in Greece with her husband for 18 years, and during that time they had five children. “In those days, I was taking care of the family. Then we moved to Rabegh in 1989 and I met a PADI scuba diving instructor and learnt to dive. I did my Open Water and Advanced Diver there, and then we moved to Jeddah in 1991, the year of the Gulf War. Once in Jeddah, I went through all the courses – but I didn't intend to become an instructor, I was enjoying my time being a Dive Master to my instructor. I didn't want the responsibility. But it was my instructor who pushed me into becoming an instructor, so that we could teach together. I am currently a Master Instructor and can teach up to and including Assistant Instructor. To be able to teach people up to instructor level, you have to train to become a Course Director.” Andriopoulos is not interested in taking that extra step. “I am too old now,” she says laughing. Her students include a few Saudis, but they are mostly expats. “There are lots of Saudi girls learning to dive nowadays, but there are now Arabic speaking women instructors, including Saudis, and so the Saudi girls usually use them.” Her love of scuba diving is total: “I just love being underwater, I love the feel of it and there is always something to see – even if you are diving in the same place all the time, you are surprised by things and I just want to make people enjoy the water as much as I do.” She used to work together with Mary Field, a naturalist who used to live in Jeddah and who wrote several books on marine life identification. “I learnt a lot from her; with the courses, she would do the classroom teaching and theory and then I took the students on the dives, and then they got a Naturalist certificate. Unfortunately, she left a few years ago and I don't know anybody else who can do this now.” Andriopoulos has seen a significant deterioration in the water and reef along the Jeddah coast over the years. “It is mainly from the building and also from sewage as there are sewage pipes going directly into the sea. But no one likes to talk about this. I think most of the damage to the local reef has been done by all the building because everybody who has a plot of land by the sea immediately wants to either dredge up the reef to bring a boat closer into the beach, or to fill in the top of the reef and build a house closer to the water. Either way, it has destroyed the reef because of the silt, sand and concrete being poured into the sea. All this gets carried with the current as well so the visibility is also much lower than it was when I first came here. There is a lot of coral that just doesn't exist here any more.” As a conservationist, Andriopoulos would like to see regulation enforced to protect the local reefs. “Another problem is litter – paper plates and other rubbish, and even chairs and tables. When I am diving with my students, we pick up what we can and take it out of the water.” By the time her youngest child was ten, she had been instructing part-time for three years. Her career then kicked-in to becoming full time – that was 14 years ago. Of her five children, one got half way through an Open Water course with her and then gave up. However, her youngest (now 24) trained with her to Dive Master level. She describes what it was like for her to train him: “Actually, he is a natural and was very easy to teach, but I am harder on my own children than I am on anyone else's. I am very strict with them because I want them to be good. I think he would make an excellent instructor – he is very calm so people like to dive with him.”
