Santa Barbara’s Vieja Valley Elementary School Helps Secure Clean Drinking Water for South Sudan

The kids at Vieja Valley elementary school near Hope Ranch were starstruck last week when they walked into their auditorium and saw Salva Dut. They had spent the last year reading Dut’s story in the best-selling book A Long Walk to Water and raised more than $5,000 for his charity providing clean drinking water to South Sudan. 

Vieja Valley was the lucky school to win Dut’s Iron Giraffe fundraising challenge — named after the drill used to dig for wells — coming out on top over thousands of other schools across the globe and winning the top prize: a visit from Dut himself.

One of the “Lost Boys of Sudan” — the roughly 20,000 young boys who fled Sudan in 1987 to escape the civil war — Dut resettled in the United States but returned to southern Sudan after his father fell ill from drinking dirty water. 

Six million people in South Sudan lack access to clean drinking water, according to Dut’s team. Children, especially girls, walk nearly four miles (eight hours) each day for water, often making multiple trips and carrying up to 40 pounds each time.  

Dut made it his mission to drill a well and ensure his father’s village had access to clean drinking water. But he didn’t stop there. Building off the experience, he created Water for South Sudan, a nonprofit that creates water points where they are needed most across the country. Since founding the organization in 2003, Dut’s helped drill more than 650 wells to provide water to more than 500,000 people. 

“Water is the foundation of everything,” he told the young crowd at Vieja Valley during his presentation on Thursday. “You’d feel terrible if you didn’t have it.” 

About 30 percent of the support for Dut’s nonprofit comes from schools, which hold coin drives  every year to fundraise for the work while learning about humanitarian struggles occurring across the globe.   

“It makes me feel really good to see that there are people in the world who want to help people that cannot help themselves,” Dut told the Independent. “And to see people coming together, especially young people, reaching out and showing that this world is going to be passed on to the good people who will take care of it.”

Sixth grade teachers Alexa Mannion and Amanda Olson led the charge last year, after noticing how moved their students were in response to Dut’s journey and everything he’s accomplished. Through classroom presentations, the coin drive, and a letter-writing campaign, the students raised both awareness and funds to help provide clean water access for villages in South Sudan. The 6th-graders even counted and rolled up all the coins themselves.

“It rallied our whole school together,” Olsen said. “The kids were just beyond themselves when they saw the live drawing and realized they had won the prize. We had to rewatch the drawing three to four times for them to actually register it.”

The entire process was a learning experience for the kids, who got to both have dinner with Dut on Wednesday and see his presentation on Thursday morning alongside two other elementary schools in the Hope School District. 

“I’m just really glad we got to raise a bunch of money and I’m just grateful for the life we got,” said Viola McBride, whose class pioneered the fundraising effort. 

“And since we got this life,” her fellow classmate, Noah Shenoda, chimed in, “we can help other people get a little closer to it.”