When Finn Case heard that some children had to walk hours every day just to get drinking water, “he just wouldn’t let up on it,” said his mother Angelique Case.
In Grade 1, Finn built a kinetic well out of a bucket for a school project on wheels, pulleys and levers at the Child Study Centre on the University of Alberta campus.
The program focus is on research and exploratory and project-based learning.
He’d decided to fill the bucket with money to buy a real well in Uganda.
“We have lots of water,” said Finn, now eight years old and a Grade 3 student at Garneau Elementary School. “We open a tap and it’s just there. They have to walk all day to a dirty pond and they can get sick from drinking it. It’s not fair.”
Over three years, he has raised just over $27,000, enough to build a ground well and a 20,000-litre rainwater collection system in southwest Uganda. Both have latrines and hand-washing stations. He is now working on raising money for a third.
“He has changed the lives of thousands of people,” said Angelique Case. “He has taught us that anything is possible.”
