St Jude’s Primary Makes a Splash!

Workshop at St Judes primary Lent 2016b

Thank you to everyone at St Jude’s RC Primary School in Fareham for all their support for CAFOD.  Petra Wagenblast had a wonderful time at your school recently when she gave a special Lent Fast Day assembly and workshop – all on our Lenten theme of water! 

Petra began the assembly by asking the children what they used water for in their everyday lives. They then held up photos of the different things they had mentioned including using the toilet, brushing their teeth, drinking, washing and cooking.  The children then guessed the amount of litres these different activities used before working out how many litres of water they used over the course of a day.

Petra then asked some volunteers to help her hold up images of footprints, to represent the number of litres used for each task.  The footprints represented 10 litres and gave the children a good idea of how much water is needed. For example, a bath typically uses 10 litres whilst flushing the loo uses 7 litres!  That’s a lot of water!

Petra told them about Nadopun, a young 9 year old girl who lives in Uganda (pictured below).

NadopunShe likes going to school with her friends and watching films. Jenny explained that Uganda is in the East of Africa and that it’s a beautiful country, however 9.2M people there do not have access to safe water. That’s one in every four people in the country! The shortage of water is down to the lack of access to water in remote areas and the changing, unpredictable and increasingly dry climate.

Watch our special film about Nadopun’s older sister Proscovia below.

As Petra explained to the children, the burden of collecting water often falls on girls and this in turn means that many drop out of school so that their families have the water that they need to drink, cook and wash.

When the local water pump broke, Nadopun’s mother and oldest sisters had to walk a long way to get water. Sometimes they couldn’t get to other boreholes so they had to collect water from the river. Nadopun’s mother says the water from the river is ‘awful’. Her brother got sick from drinking it. Thankfully CAFOD helped them fix their local borehole and now they have clean water near their home.

Petra then ended the assembly by reminding the children that the Pope has said that this year is a special Year of Mercy and one of the things we can do to show we love and care for others is to give drink to those who are thirsty.  So when we are helping communities to have access to clean water this Lent through our ‘Make a Splash’ appeal, we are being merciful, just as God is merciful to us.

Later that day, Petra led a workshop with Year 5 and played our ‘Life without taps’ game. Petra asked the children to imagine what it would be like to have to carry water long distances. She asked for volunteers to form ‘Family’ groups, and then to imagine themselves as farmers in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa, who live in a village where their pump has broken down.

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Each group had to work together to ‘collect’ water from a ‘river’ two kilometres away. The children had to make sure they collected enough to meet their family’s needs, for things such as drinking water and also water for their crops. Throughout the game groups were also given ‘chance cards’ which meant they then had to deal with changes to their situation that could affect their ability to collect enough water. The first family to collect the minimum daily amount of water was the winner!

Winning Family St Judes primary Lent 2016

The Winning Team!!

The aim of the game was to show how hard it is to obtain enough water for daily life in areas where there are no taps nearby and the water supply is unreliable and quite possibly polluted. At the end of the game, each family had to fill in a sheet to show how many of their needs they have been able to fulfil through the collection of water. From this activity the children learned to value the importance of having clean safe water, and how precious it is to their lives.

Thank you so much to everyone at St Jude’s for all your support for CAFOD and thank you too to Petra for making this great visit!




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