Drinking water and restrooms are readily available to most school children in America,
that is not the case across the developing world.
Special correspondent Fred to Sam Lázaro reports on schools coming together around
water. Part of the story was shot in Uganda just before the pandemic.
It's part of his series Agents for Change in Rwanda.
Across the developing world, many schools lack not only books or desks,
but something even more basic water to drink for sanitation.
I grew up in a village in Uganda.
Houses, didn't have water kitchens, didn't have water.
Schools never had water.
So without water,
there's a lot less education going on.
Fundamentally, that's what I said
to a SIGIR Jackson. Kaguri founded Nyaka, a school tucked high
in southern Uganda's mountainous region.
It provides free education to children who've lost a parent to HIV AIDS.
Kaguri, who now lives in Michigan, vividly remembers those early years.
Still, the reality for millions of children around the world,
going to school at seven a.m. in the morning and finish school at five
p.m. without drinking a sip of water.
When I set out to build a schools, one of the things I
was determined to have is clean water.
The Nyaka schools clean water comes from a rain collection system.
The local community raised some funds to install these large tanks and provided
material and labor. But a significant chunk of the funding came from an
unlikely source, Minderoo another.
Right now, school fundraisers in suburban White Bear Lake, Minnesota.
There's plenty of water here, but students haven't come to this event just to soak their
teachers.
It's an exercise in building empathy for children elsewhere who work literally
laboriously to fetch water for their daily use by
the Minnesota students. Get a tiny idea of what that's like carrying
two liter bottles for a mile along the lakeshore.
They were carrying buckets of lake water a few hundred feet for a chance to dunk
teacher Ben Butters, who helped connect his students to the Ugandan school
gym teacher.
Buttars teaches physical education at Mitofsky International School.
Part of the local district.
We just work together all year long, coming up with ideas on how we can conserve water
at our school and in our town and at homes and how we could teach that to the younger
kids. And then we connect that to the global issue where
some kids their age have to walk miles for water.
His water curriculum and the Uganda connection was made possible by H2O
for Life, a group that partner schools across the U.S.
and Canada with those in developing countries and recently the Navajo Nation.
I had a friend in Kenya that asked me if I know anybody who could help him because
his community was desperate for water. Their kids were dying.
Retired Minnesota schoolteacher Patti Hall founded H2O for Life in
2007.
So I wrote a letter back and said, how much would it cost?
And he said, Seven hundred thousand Kenyan shillings.
And I kind of choked until I realized that meant seven thousand dollars
by the end of the school year haul and her students raised nearly double that
inspired. She founded H2O for Life and has so far helped about 1500
North American schools create nearly a thousand water and sanitation projects
in low resource settings.
These projects are only half funded on purpose.
Well, I got good advice from a really smart man in the water sector who said don't fund
an entire project and make it a gift, because then it's not only by the community.
You want to do a shared project so that the community has Buy-In and it's going to be
sustainable for the future.
And then butter's nice to meet you.
Jackson takes a visit, made that connection to the world even more personal.
Kaguri visited Hald Buttars and a group of H2O for life students in
White Bear Lake.
Because of your help and hard work and generosity, guys
like you now have
written to the seventh grader. Ava Barth is one of the program's so-called water
warriors.
I realized how much I was taking water for granted and like I really wanted to help
people act, don't have water available to them every day.
Just before the pandemic call led a tour group to some of H2O for life
schools, including Nyaka,
the
where 17 year old Prema Bari played host.
Before we had water in our school, we suffered so much we could
fetch water from very far, covering jerrycans from very small places.
So now you're able to use the time to do something else.
What are you using the time to do?
We are using that time to revise our books, do our personal
administration like washing, bathing,
preparing books for the next day?
If we build a culture of kids, generation of students
that take actions and see others as equals and
treat people kindly and give them the same dignity that everyone deserves.
That's my hope for the whole world right there.
For its part, H2O for Life hopes to see a sharp increase in school partnerships
in the next year, even with the pandemic disruptions.
The group says it raised some 210000 dollars in the most recent
school year, enough to fund 75 water and sanitation projects
in places where it will make a big difference.
For the PBS NewsHour. I'm Fred Decem.
Lázaro Freds reporting is a partnership with The Untold
Stories Project at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota.