This year’s Walk for Water raises awareness — and more than $1,300

The 7th Grade’s annual Walk for Water, held May 25, served as a reminder to students about how scarcity and hard work can shape the lives of people who grow up in other parts of the world — and not always in a positive way. The middle schoolers each carried six liters of water — a little over 12 pounds’ worth — a distance of four miles, from Greenhills to Parker Mill County Park, where students returned the water to Fleming Creek. The distance chosen isn’t random, according to science teacher Ann Novak, Diversity Director Nadine Hall, and Media Specialist Jan Chernin, who organize the effort each year: it’s the average distance many women in the developing world must carry water each day to help ensure the health of  their families.

In fact, Novak said, the daily need to acquire and transport fresh water is one reason girls often leave school. Which is why this year’s event again raised money to drill a well at a school — this one in South Sudan — through H20 for Life, an organization that raises money for water-related projects for partner schools in the developing world. Since 2012, Greenhills students have raised more than $10,000 for schools through the organization. This year’s Greenhills total was more than $1,300 — 118 percent of the amount pledged.

“They did a fantastic job,” Novak said of student organizers.

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Novak said the annual event supports one of the goals of  7th grade science at Greenhills: helping students realize they’re global citizens whose actions can have a positive impact on the world.

“For this one day,” she said, “we experience what girls and women do every day in places like Africa where fresh water is scarce.”