The Problem with PADI

Cahuil has been Travelling, or atleast not been home to Argentina, for 3 years. He has been all over Central America, but decided to stop off for a bit and stay in Bocas. He got involved in Diving kinda by accident, his friend just told him to come one day. He hasn't done his dive master but he works for a school and knows more than some people who have paid the money and had the training...which is my issue with PADI (put another dollar in) if you have the money you can be an instructor in no time, but without the experience you really need to actually be an instructor...a guy French guy called Bertran, who I met at my hostel and runs a dive school near La Rochelle in France, told me that for a while French dive schools were not allowed to let PADI instructors work at their schools without them doing the qualification CMAS first, because with CMAS you have to have 8 months worth of experience before you can take the exam...with PADI its a couple of weeks! So Cahuil is in this situation where he is a qualified through experience to be a dive master or an instructor but doesn't have the money to pay to get to that level, and until you do you can't officially work. So what you can have in the PADI world is relatively unqualified instructors and dive masters working, taking care of the lives of other people who got their not necessarily through experience but cause they had the money...I'm by no way saying this is everyone, I'm sure there are tonnes of PADI instructors and divers who love what they do and are good at it, but by the very nature of PADI it means you can have people who aren't as qualified to take care of people's lives.