Three graders campaign for safe drinking water

Three graders campaign for safe drinking water

Tarek Aziz

Sohan, Tamjid, Nasir, Afia, Urmi, and some others are three graders of Shaheed Tojo Government Primary School. The Primary School is situated in an underprivileged zone of Dhaka city. The largest portion of this community is slum dwellers and lives on working in readymade garments factories and woodshops. Around 60 percent people of this area used to drink unpurified tap water. Consequently, almost each and every person in this area was suffering from water-borne chronic diseases like diarrhea, vomiting, and other skin and respiratory diseases round the year, according to several statistics.

The three graders came to know of the fatal health risks of drinking impure water on their school campus from a lesson in a special class taken by the fellows of Teach for Bangladesh (TFB). Although they belong to lower-income families, they are advanced in thinking and activities than many of their peers in other school. Thanks to the lesson from TFB, they realised that people in their communities are suffering because of impure tap water they drink. Then they decided to create awareness among local people about the consequences drinking impure tap waters.

The three graders started to design placards, posters, leaflets on art papers under the supervision of TFB fellows. They used coloured pencils to make those lucrative. They also prepared themselves for weeks to stage short drama to deliver the message to the community people about the detrimental health risk of drinking impure water bringing the real scenario on their mind. These youngsters spend a day in a week for the campaign. Basically, they go to a certain school or institution and make an announcement about their awareness activities and when the local people along with school students join with them, they illustrate the hazardous aspects of using and drinking unsafe water. The awareness posters itself elucidate, typically, the source of impure water, the causes of waterborne diseases, the necessity of drinking pure water, sources of pure drinking water, and the systems of purifying the impure water, and so on. They also try to embed the message into the people’s mind staging a drama too.

Students are campaigning for safe drinking water 

After several months of their campaign, the result became obvious. The trained three graders of the school reached about 1200 people and they set up a water purifier on the school campus in association with another non-profit organisation ‘Footsteps’ as there was no available pure drinking water source in that community. Now the locals are easily collecting the pure water from the source and the waterborne disease has reduced drastically and the attendance rate in the class has increased by several folds.

Adib Rahman Ethar, a former student of Jahangirnagar University, and J.M. Saiful Islam, a former student of East West University, are the fellows of Teach for Bangladesh. They are the supervisor of the capstone project that is running in Shaheed Tojo Government Primary School. The head teacher of the school is so much pleased on the TFB fellows for their hard-work in implementing the project and innovative ideas.

‘The initiatives of Teach for Bangladesh’ is praiseworthy. Their working procedure is outstanding, especially, surveying, teaching technique, and overall the purpose to eradicate the health hazards due to drinking impure water’, said the head teacher of the school Shahanaj Akter.

Sohan, one of the three grader said, “When I see happy faces of the kids while drinking safe water from the filter in the school, I feel that I am the happiest man on earth. It is a small step towards development. We want to ensure safe drinking water for each and every person in the country”.

The writer is a student of Chemistry Department of Jahangirnagar University. He can be reached at tarekju45@gmail.com