WATER MOVING CHALLENGE
by Jessica (Y7)
Today year 4,5 and 6 took part in a water carrying challenge. This involved collecting water from the stream and tackling a number of obstacles while carrying the water back to the base. This highlighted the challenges that people face in many countries daily in the quest to access water. Although the children all had fun they also learnt some important lessons from Miss Wright.
Water is one of the key things that you need to survive. You can survive 3 days without water. But yet water can also be very dangerous. Of course if you live in a rich country then you just turn the tap to get water. But it’s not like that in all countries. The poor countries suffer. An estimated 4,000 children die every day from filthy water. Not only that, girls and women have to travel on average 6km to get that water. That is the same as walking around a full-size football pitch 15 times. Then once they have walked there they have to get the water. The average amount of water that a woman carries is around 20 litres of water on her head.
That might sound like a lot but it is not actually that much. For example a shower per minute is about 10 – 12 litres of water and a 10 minute shower is around 100 litres of water. 7 – 9 litres of water to flush a toilet ,50 litres of water to run a washing machine and ,if you leave the tap on whilst brushing your teeth, that’s 6 litres of water that goes down the drain. An average adult should drink around 2 litres of water per day. On average, a family of four uses 100 gallons of water per day and 12,000 litres of water per month. That’s 60 times round a football pitch.
This is getting better though there are many charities that are helping this cause such as Water Aid. Water Aid has installed water pumps with clean water in poor and rural areas.This has helped over 27 million people. Clean water is something that lots of people take for granted but just these little things like turning the tap off, which will help preserve this very important resource.
