Schooltime

23 September. Udenhout, Netherlands.

Since July 23th we, the founders of Charity Travel, and our daughter Miru, are in the Netherlands, after a pandemic time that we spent in splendid isolation on a beach and its stunning backcountry in southern Thailand. We like it here and we were able to send Miru to school with no bureaucratic obstacles. This is, we are well aware of it, a great privilege. 

In many places around the world, access to primary education is problematic because parents live too far from school or they can't afford the mandatory school fees. Luckily, this statistic has improved a lot over the past decades. Especially girl's literacy has increased, leading to social improvement and a plethora of positive side effects. Yet, it is not the time to pat ourselves on the shoulders and lean back. 

There is still a lot of work to be done to ensure that every child can successfully finish at least elementary school education. In a world grappling with rising inequality and increasingly disastrous environmental problems, it is key that people start off in life from a robust and relatively equal position. It shouldn't matter if you are the child of a billionaire or a bumpkin, the elementary education (the basics that you receive rather than actively get) should not set up one child for a fortune while leaving another behind.

Miru has learned to write a bicycle (20k journeys are no problem at all), write in cursive, deal with conflicts in school, work on a tablet, and a host of other skills. Every day, she returns from school with a smile on her face, making her parents equally happy.