MORGANTOWN — More than 2,000 people.
Think about that.
That might be the student body of your kid’s high school.
Or, the population of your little hometown in West Virginia you left for Morgantown and WVU.
You know there were easily that many people in front of you the last time you were waiting to get into a Mountaineers game at Milan Puskar Stadium (sure seemed like it, anyway).
The number 2,000 is a number with teeth. And shrapnel and other twisted metal.
Especially for the 2,000 who died in the world in 2016 by stepping on landmines from wars long past.
That number is according to the Landmine and Cluster Munition Monitor, and other international publications charting the same.
Thousands more were maimed by the leftover ordnance, losing limbs more often than not.
Which is why all those students at St. Francis de Sales Central Catholic School on Friday were walking around with one pant leg pulled up.
On any other day, the look may have been considered a fun fad, but on this day, it wasn’t about fashion.
It was about solidarity.
And even with the light-hearted approach, the intent was deadly serious — because of that number with the three zeros.
The school on Guthrie Lane was observing “Lend Your Leg” day, which was founded by the United States Campaign to Ban Landmines, an advocacy group based in Takoma Park, Md.
“Lend Your Leg” at St. Francis stands on the efforts of the school’s group, PSALM — which stands for Proud Students Against Landmines and Cluster Bombs.
Students founded the group in 1999 with the help of art teacher Nora Sheets, who has since become internationally known for her travels to Bosnia, Cambodia and other spots in the world where such buried devices are still maiming and killing to this day.
PSALM, in fact, was inspired by a trip to Bosnia.
Sheets decided to put her faith, and her art, on a passport stamp.
Bosnia was fractured by bullets, bombs and tucked-away landmines. Sheets went there on a humanitarian mission.
She was going to help the war’s youngest victims sketch and paint their way out of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
“These little, little kids were drawing their schools encircled by landmines,” she told The Dominion Post previously.
Worse than that, she said, it didn’t take her long to notice that many of those young artists knew up close and personal what those explosive devices can do.
“I saw kids with no legs, or an arm or hand blown off,” Sheets said.
PSALM over the years has raised money to buy an artificial leg for an injured boy in Bosnia and to train bomb-sniffing dogs across the world.
