By MAKS GOLDENSHTEYN

UW News Lab

The hit song “MMMBop” might have given the boy band Hanson a legion of fans in the late ‘90s, but a decade later that same song would invoke the sound of nails on a chalkboard to teenage listeners.

That’s why Lake Washington High School senior Anahita Nakhjiri decided to blast the song from a stereo over and over again at lunchtime last fall as part of her senior project.

She wouldn’t stop unless her fellow students paid up.

“After a while most people started throwing change in there because they couldn’t stand that song any more,” Lake Washington senior Karl Meyer said.

Of course, Nakhjiri wasn’t interested in torturing the student body, but rather raising funds for the children of northern Uganda, whose daily struggle is documented in the film “Invisible Children,” which a former English teacher of hers had recommended.

Inspired by what she saw, Nakhjiri started a club at her school to make a difference.

She showed students short video clips to raise awareness about the problems that afflict the displaced children.

“It was an issue that not a lot of kids in the country knew about,” Nakhjiri said.

Some Lake Washington students complained that the footage was too emotional and vivid, Nakhjiri said. Others were inspired knowing they could better the lives of children in another part of the world.

Meyer, a pitcher on Lake Washington’s baseball team, first saw “Invisible Children” at his church. He remembers being moved by the stories of the children who walk to city centers every night to evade the guerilla army that operates in the country.

A reconstructive elbow surgery in April of his junior year made it impossible for Meyer to play baseball last summer. So he decided to put on a hike as a fundraiser and asked members of his church to sponsor him.

“The kids have to walk every night to the city so they can sleep safely, so I felt like it would be appropriate,” Meyer said. “I walk because they have to walk.”

And walk he did for nine days and 116 miles.

Meyer hiked 35 miles during the first two days of the trip, after which his entire body began to ache. He was more tired after the second day than at the very end of the trip. Eventually, Meyer would find his rhythm, hiking longer distances in shorter periods of time.

“I finally started to kind of get into almost like a Zen state,” he said.

The trip took Meyer from Holden Village, located above Lake Chelan, along the Pacific Crest Trail and finally to the Canadian border. After finishing the hike, Meyer got to sleep in a real bed at a friend’s house in Winthrop.

“I woke up the next morning and felt like I came out of a coma,” he said.

Meyer donated the $4,500 he raised to Nakhjiri’s club as part of his own senior project the following fall. In total, the club raised more than $10,000 to go toward rebuilding Anaka Secondary School in northern Uganda during a 100-day contest put on by the Schools for Schools program, created by the Invisible Children organization.

The efforts of the Lake Washington’s students earned them second place in the Northwest region for total money raised.

“I think youth feel really empowered when they see their efforts are making a difference,” Nakhjiri said.

Even if they did have to put up with “MMMBop.”

MAKS GOLDENSHTEYN is a student in the University of Washington Department of Communication News Laboratory.