Amarillo, Texas

Most high school seniors around this time are just hoping to get their first semester of the year over with, but not the AP economic students at Amarillo High School.

Their thoughts are focused on students more than 8,000 miles away.

Betsy Bargsley, senior at AHS says,”Our project is raising money for a well in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for a school called Hiber School. It’s a secondary school. It’s for middle and high school kids there. They do not have any running water, they also do not have a latrine system.”

Bargsley volunteered in Ethiopia during the summer. When she came back to Amarillo High, her story about the children influenced her classmates.

David Williams, the AHS Economics teacher says, “We kind of got really excited about it and decided we wanted to take it a little bit further. So, we created a semi-business project with a few products we wanted to sell.”

However, the fundraising went above and beyond the students’ expectations.

Williams says, “We initially thought we could raise a couple thousand dollars and then it gained a lot of momentum. The best thing in the world is to watch kids get fired up about anything, especially whenever it’s serving, sacrificing, and doing great things for other people.”

Students say finishing this project means a lot, even if they don’t get recognized for their efforts.

Robert Hillier, an AHS Senior says, “People will be like, ‘Oh yeah, we can do that’ and then just never really happens. But I felt like with this, D-Will was able to get us all fired up about it, and we just put everything we had into it, and it just gives you a good feeling knowing that you are making a difference to people you don’t even know, and they may never know who did it for them, but they are going to have that water forever.”