By Susan Verde, Georgie Badiel
A girl in Burkina Faso walks miles for water every single day, based on the childhood of the model Georgie Badiel.
Princess Gie Gie can tame wild dogs and make the tall grass sway, but she cannot make water come. So she gets up before the sun with her maman, balances a clay pot on her head, and walks. Past the dogs, past the grass, over the hills, all morning, to a well. The water she carries home is not clear. It has to sit and settle and then be boiled before anyone can drink it, and by the time she's washed and eaten and had one careful cup, it's almost gone. Tomorrow she'll do it again. At night she imagines water close by, clear and cold, and her mother tells her: someday.
Nothing here is explained to your child. They simply follow a girl through one ordinary day and arrive, on their own, at the fact that the day is not ordinary at all. That's a far better way in than a statistic. And because it's about not having enough clean water rather than about ruining the earth, it gives a class the water question from the human end first, which is where children actually live.