Wherever you are in the world education is a key element to a more fulfilling life. Ruurs herself an education specialist celebrated the love of reading in her award-winning previous title My Librarian Is a Camel: How Books Are Brought to Children Around the World. In her latest she captures children around the globe going to school in some unexpected locations.

A first-ever school in a small village in Afghanistan taught more than a thousand children to read and write especially girls who were too-long denied an education – but even a protective wall was not enough to keep it safe from the current turmoil throughout the country and the school was sadly demolished. But hope keeps the villagers believing in education and a new school someday.

In the Australian outback and Egyptian desert children gather around their computers for classes via the internet! In the tropical regions of Cambodia students take boats to their floating school; so too in the Guatemalan rainforest students are ferried to their schools. In remote Indian villages children learn out in the open while Kenyan children study under a tree.

Children from all over the world gather at an international school in Malaysia while kids from neighboring villages are taught at a monastery in Myanmar. Many sacrifices are made to allow children to go to a community school high in the Himalayas of Nepal. Young boys are sent to boarding school in Scotland while home schooling proves to be a popular option for American children. Perhaps most striking of all is school aboard the MV Anastasis a hospital ship that continually goes around the world providing free health care in developing countries. How cool is that?!!

Readers: Children Middle Grade

Published: 2009