In school, students are taught from a young age just how important water is – that it makes up most of our bodies, covers most of our planet and is essential to our longevity and survival.
Essential, but not guaranteed.
For the 1,600 students at Cobach High School in Nogales, Sonora, Mexico – a border town just south of Nogales, Arizona – it’s a lesson rehashed daily through personal experience. At least, it was.
Due to the unavailability of potable water on school grounds, students had been reduced to bringing their own bottles of water to school every day just to stay hydrated.
But thanks to some assistance from the local Nogales rotary club and Martín Medina with Molex-Nogales, Cobach High School now has clean drinking water with the addition of brand-new water fountains on campus. Molex contributed $4,800 to the project, and Medina helped supervise the installation.
“Molex is committed to this community and to the students,” says Medina. “With the support of our local rotary club, we invested in a potable water system that provides clean, chilled drinking water.”
Chilled water is important in Nogales, where the summer heat can push the mercury past 104°F. In addition to beating the heat, having chilled water available to students will save them from spending money on bottled water every time they’re thirsty.
“We’ve dreamt of improving our school for a long time, and now we’re accomplishing it,” says principal Cuauhtémoc Martínez. “This helps our students’ lives. Our students will save around a dollar a day by not having to buy bottled water. From this day on, we’ll have purified water.”
To celebrate and inaugurate the new fountain installation, the school hosted an opening ceremony and ribbon cutting for students, faculty and the local media.
Watch the inauguration here.
Note: All quotes in this article were translated from Spanish.