Kids Climb a 2,600-High Mountain Just to Go to School

If you think being stuck in traffic for three hours just to get to work is hell, you might want to think again. A video footage of school children scaling a very steep 2,600-foot cliff just to get to school shocked people from all over.

Children of impoverished Sichuan village scale a 2,600 foot mountain to get to school.

These children are around 6 to 15 years of age and they come from a remote, impoverished village in China called Sichuan. In the video, the children are seen scaling a rickety ladder, no harness and safety gear, of an almost vertical mountain.

Children use an old rickety ladder to climb up and down the mountain.

Most of the kids are bare-handed as they take the trip to and from school. The journey takes them around an hour and a half uphill and downhill, according to Beijing News. Photographer Chen Jie accompanied the children one time on their commute to school.

Watch the video here:

According to Chen Jie, “Every single climb felt like rubbing shoulders with death.” The photographer stated that the children had to endure this deth-defying journey to school is because the village cannot afford to provide proper infrastructure.

Children aged 6-15 years old, take a break on their way to school.

County officers have already tried to build a road to make things easier for the children but the project became too expensive for the government and the villagers. There have been around seven or eight people already who have died as they scaled the cliff, said the village chief.

Often, the children scale the mountain bare-handed and without safety gear.

Those who have seen the video on Weibo had mixed reactions about it. One user of the Chinese social networking site exclaimed, “This has to be fake! Doesn’t our mighty country receive millions of dollars in international aid every year? How can it not even build a road for young village schoolchildren?”

The journey takes an average of 1.5 to 2 hours to and from school

Chen hopes that his photographs would open the eyes of authorities and big changes be done to help the children and prevent deaths from happening any further.

The same plight is faced by the schoolchildren of Nepal who have to traverse dangerous mountains just to get to and from school.