This is the world's most harrowing route to school

Children make their way down from their village to school.

(Image credit: Twitter.com/irishsunonline)

published 27 May 2016

So, you had to walk five miles to school, uphill, in the snow? That's absolutely nothing compared to the route children living in an isolated mountain village in China have to take.

In the Atuler village in Sichuan province, 15 children between the ages of 6 and 15 have a treacherous 90-minute journey to school that takes them down a 2,600-foot rock face — some areas have unsteady ladders, while in other sections the children have only rocks to grab onto. When photographer Chen Jie of the Beijing News first witnessed this dangerous commute, he was "shocked by the scene I saw in front of me," he told The Guardian. He hopes that the photos he took of the children carrying their backpacks as they make their way down the sheer rock will change this "painful reality."

The village's oral history says its founders selected this mountaintop to avoid war. The community is home to 72 people, and the head of the village, Api Jiti, told the Beijing News "seven or eight" people have died after losing their grip and falling down the mountainside, with even more injured. The children now have to board at school so they don't have to make the trek every day, and they only go home twice a month to visit their families. The community is very poor, The Guardian reports, with villagers living on an estimated $1 a day or less, and there isn't room to build a school. The region's Communist Party spokesman said while they develop a permanent solution to the village's accessibility problem, a steel staircase will be constructed to connect the townspeople to the outside world.

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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