Sophomore Nadia Mburu said as a Kenyan, she feels clean water is necessary for a child’s education, and wants to do anything she can to help.

“Having clean water is important. We want to limit the number of dangerous and timely trips children have to endure to get clean water,” Mburu said. “Also it’s really important to me, as a Kenyan, and since I can’t be doing anything directly this is the closest I can get.”

Civics teacher Kara Cisco said clean water is necessary for more than just drinking as access to it can stop outbreaks of disease, especially among young children.

“It’s so easy to take water for granted when we think of water we automatically go to drinking. The school that we’re donating to, they don’t even have water for toilets, which causes a lot of outbreaks of disease,” Cisco said. “Additionally, there’s an enormous loss of instruction time (because) students are walking miles to get water twice a day.”

According to Cisco, her and the other teachers on her team needed a way to keep students interested while teaching a less engaging topic at the end of the school year.

“As teachers, the ninth grade Civics/Economics team was looking for a really dynamic way of teaching macroeconomic concepts which can be kind of a downer at the end

 of the year,” Cisco said. “We taught kids all these economic metrics that are in state standards that are important to know for life, but maybe you’re not super excited about it if you’re 15 and it’s June.”

Sophomore Lily Metzler said because Park has the available resources to give people in Kenya clean water, they have to take that opportunity and the fundraiser gives people a chance to help.

“Building this well is going to help the kids and people in Kenya. This is important because it’s a serious problem because we have all the resources we need to help these people and we don’t donate or help them in any way,” Metzler said.

Cisco said after teaching her students the key parts of macroeconomics, they got to apply their knowledge to find a country that needed their help.

“We taught them like GDP, inflation rate, unemployment rate, all these different things. Then we asked them to pick a country that they identify as being in need in some way,” Cisco said.

Cisco said later they chose to include a fundraiser in the plans because with help, her students could do something to improve the country they were focused on.

“As we were envisioning how it was going to look, we realized that pairing it up with a fundraiser would make a lot of sense. We had the kids pick the school to donate to, the kids designed everything and the kids have raised over 100 dollars in two days,” Cisco said.

According to Metzler, this fundraiser could save tons of lives and help improve the quality of life for many people.

“I think that this is good because people in Kenya have a really hard time obtaining clean water and building this well will save lives and help thousands of people every dayget access to clean water,” Metzler said.

Mburu said she hopes they are able to raise enough to build a well and believes they will succeed.

“Our goal is to raise enough money so a well can be built for a Kenyan school. I think we’ll succeed,” Mburu said.