Walking around the track after school Wednesday carrying recycling containers filled with water, Junior World Affairs Council members raised nearly $150 in its Pledge to end Poverty event. Designed to simulate what it’s like to live in poverty, JWAC members got a brief experience of what it’s like to live in a place where water isn’t as readily available.

“This is the first time I’ve carried a tub of water around the track,” sophomore Chris Yu said. “It sounds so weird, but it’s interesting how that’s what a lot of people do on a daily basis and that’s just to get the basic water.”

Even though the event was only a tiny taste of what some people go through, it was an eye opening experience for sophomore Justin Jung.

“Being able to relate to what people do every day that we did just for an hour,” Jung said. “They do it for survival and we did it for fun and they probably carry five times as much as we carried and we were complaining about it.”

The money raised from Wednesday’s event helps to provide funds to people around the world.

“They can put this money into an account that gives out microloans to people that can’t get ordinary loans like people in the United States can,” JWAC sponsor and social studies teacher Tim Johannes said. “Then we loan that money out and give that money to people that pay it back and then we loan it out again so it recycles in the world. We think it’s our way of making the world a better place.”

The microloans fund various projects with the ability to benefit an untold number of people while also giving the Pledge to end Poverty participants something more personal.

“We live in such a privileged world that sometime you have to be able to know what’s going on outside of you,” freshman Mia Choi said. “It make you appreciate your own life.”