Donate To Help Out a Fellow Diver

Hi, my name is Dani. My scuba diving instructor is George Kiss, and he has taken me through my Open Water, Advanced and Rescue. Recently, medical issues, coupled with the pandemic, have caused him some financial issues. Since GoFundMe isn't supported in Japan, I wanted to help him out. Here is his story below.

Hi everyone, I’m George, and I’m a dive instructor from Hungary. I’m lucky enough to have lived on the beautiful subtropical island of Okinawa, Japan since 2016. For my first six years here, I was able to grow my dive business, specializing in providing an English-speaking service to foreigners living in and visiting Japan. The job is physically demanding but incredibly rewarding when you see how much joy it can bring people to see the incredible sights underwater.

Like for many others working in an industry dependent on tourists, the last two years of the COVID pandemic have caused me a lot of financial stress. With the borders completely shut to any foreign tourists, my customer numbers dropped to just 10-20% of their previous level, and after depleting my savings, I was treading a very careful line to have enough money to pay for rent, bills, and food, as well as dive membership and insurance fees. In the end, I ended up taking on debt at the beginning of the year, in the hopes that I’d be able to make enough money in the busier summer season to pay it back.

Unfortunately, before the summer season started, I began experiencing very bad pains in my chest. Sharp sudden pain, almost like someone is stabbing you in the heart. When I got it checked out, I was told that I had an arrhythmia that I needed an ablation ( where they burn/freeze the nonworking parts of the heart from the inside to correct it.

Although I have health insurance, this only pays for 80% of the cost of the surgery, with the remaining 20% needing to be paid out of pocket. While this amount of money would not have been an issue in a normal year, after the last two years in the pandemic, I wasn’t able to pay this without taking on extra debt.

To make matters worse, my heart condition also meant that it was no longer safe for me to dive, causing me to lose the earnings that I had been depending on to pull me out of debt. While I was able to find some local, short-term work, my period of recovery from surgery, followed by finally catching COVID, has meant that my income this summer has not been enough to pay the bills.

As someone who had always been strong and healthy, coming to terms with having a heart condition has been a struggle, especially when half a world away from my closest family and friends. It’s so difficult to ask for help, when I’m much more comfortable giving it. But, as I have to remind myself, I am incredibly lucky to be alive to be able to ask for help from others.

Hopefully, tests will soon show that my heart is on the mend and I will be able to get back to what I truly love – giving everyone all my knowledge, passion and love for the ocean. I dream about the day when the doctor will say the magic words: “George, you can go back diving again.”

If you can spare anything to help me get back on my feet again, I will be truly grateful. And if we ever cross paths in real life, I hope to be able to buy you a beer, and show you the beautiful world underwater.

Thank you.