When water is on your mind

As you may have noticed, recently we’ve been having some dramatic weather in Bahrain leaving some areas looking more like Venice than the Middle East.

But whilst the rain and its aftermath may have been a bit of a nuisance for a while, things are generally getting back to normal again and when the weather warms up the storms will be assigned to the past and it will be business as usual.

But what if you couldn’t just get back to normal, turn on the taps and get the water you need when you needed it? What if dirty water was all you had? In the developing world, nearly one billion people are at the mercy of dirty, diseased water, but how do you convey this to children to whom water isn’t seen as a luxury item?

I once saw a wonderful teacher explaining to a Year 5 class that 97 per cent of the Earth’s water is saline. He went on to demonstrate this using a large bowl and a clear 30cl water bottle. The children poured 10 litres of water into the bowl (representing the world’s total), then filled the 30cl bottle to represent all the fresh water in the world.

Next they poured two-thirds of the water in the 30cl bottle into another container, representing unreachable fresh water (water within the earth’s surface). The remaining one-third in the small bottle represented all of the water in the world that is left to drink - for seven billion people.

They then split the remaining water into two glass jugs, one represented the drinking water of countries in the developing world, the other represented drinking water for the rest of the world.

A lot of the water we drink comes from rivers, many contaminated with cholera, dysentery, typhoid and worm-based infections. So, why is the water we drink so clean, the teacher asked?

The teacher then filled two jugs with water from the tap and went on to make both jugs of water dirty, using soil, sand, dead insects and even raisins to represent human waste.  The class were dared to drink it. Needless to say, no one did.

As a means of explaining how water is cleaned to make it drinkable, the teacher filtered one jug of dirty water through filter paper and a sieve and boiled it once it looked clear. One more fine sieve after it had cooled and it was clean enough to drink.

In the other jug, the soil and sediments had sunk to the bottom, but some matter was left floating on the top. The key learning point came when the teacher asked which jug the children would rather drink from.

The answer was obvious … but remarkably millions of children around the world don’t have a choice.

Water Aid is a worldwide charity that changes lives by funding projects that provide clean and safe drinking water to communities around the world that need it. They help schools to organise charity fundraising days that not only raise awareness of this enormous problem but also help to raise funds to tackle it.

For more information visit: https:// www.wateraid.org