Students at Orchard Park Public School recently engaged in a hands-on water-carrying project designed to teach empathy and understanding.
During a hiking activity, students carried heavy buckets of water for long distances to learn what it’s like for many people around the world who live in places where clean drinking water is not readily available.
John Dinner, a teacher at Orchard Park Public School, explained that the activity was part of the culmination of the Burlington class’s novel study of A Long Walk to Water. The book depicts two central characters from South Sudan – Salva, a young man in 1985 and Nya, a young woman in 2008.
“Salva's story takes place during the Sudanese Civil war, when he’s forced from his village, and spends many years in various refugee camps before being adopted by a family in the United States as a teenager,” said Dinner. “He eventually sets up a not-for-profit organization to bring water to the villages of Sudan. Nya's story could be any number of thousands of girls in Sudan who spend their days retrieving water for their families.”
At the beginning of the activity, students walked approximately 500 metres. They timed themselves to see how long it would take, with the first walk taking around six minutes. Students were divided into two groups of 12, with each group carrying an eight-litre bucket of water. They walked as far as they could with the water, and took turns carrying the bucket when someone got tired.
Eventually, they worked their way up to walking 600 metres. To put this exercise into perspective, Dinner said Nya, in A Long Walk to Water, travelled approximately 10 kilometres each way, twice a day, for a total of eight hours to collect drinking water.
“The activity was to emphasize empathy and understanding in students about the importance of water and what people go through every day to get it,” Dinner said. “I hope students learned they’re fortunate when it comes to an essential resource such as water, and that people face incredible adversity for survival.”
The water-carrying activity made many students reflect on how difficult it is for some people to live day to day.
Ahmad, a Grade 7 student, said: “I learned it is very difficult to walk long distances with water. We didn't even walk that far and it was hard.”
“I learned it would be hard to be Nya,” said Jada, in Grade 7. “To carry all that water for your family would be very difficult. It will make us work harder for what we have and enjoy what we have.”
The A Long Walk to Water novel study allowed students to learn more about character education, Dinner explained. It augmented Language Arts, health, Geography, physical and human experiences, and Science, including human interactions with the environment.
Dinner noted his class will next be examining the concept of grit and “how we can develop it within ourselves.”