Kids that travel.

When I was a kid, before Instagram and google, everything I knew about the world, I learned from kids in school who would go on these exotic holidays.

They would disappear from school for a bit and return all shiny and tanned and they would stand in front of the class and tell us all about Tokyo or India, show us photos of Gaudi’s house in Barcelona which I thought was the most magical place I had ever seen, with its melty windows or Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam, which terrified me and amazed me all in one go.

I could write a long winded status on how expensive holidays are in school holidays, but we all know it and all know it’s bullshit.

So I put the holiday request in to the school, was refused and advised to withdraw them from school or I would be fined, so I did.

I then re applied for their place, 4 days after withdrawing them, and was told they had no space, so I would have to apply to other schools.

When the kids were in Asia they saw elephants in a sanctuary, learned about the terrible elephant trade and what they can do to help. They saw monkeys in the street, they hiked in the jungle, they fell in love with people whose lives were nothing like their friends at home. They ate food from carts in the street, from a woman who had a newborn baby strapped to her back. They learned why they should take their shoes off to go into other people’s houses, why they leave red pop for the spirits, they learned that if people didn’t work, they would starve and die, they saw charities working tirelessly, but slowly making things better.

The thing is, travelling on instagram, looks fuckin beautiful, it’s all filtered and colourful, it doesn’t show the mountains of plastic rubbish in the streets cos the rubbish incinerator broke 8 years ago, it doesn’t show the sewerage being filtered into the sea or the elephants, so starved and exhausted that a crane is needed to pick her up, and get her on a drip. It’s all pretty girls and cocktails on a beach.

In this world, where anything is possible, but we don’t know what’s real, I want them to see it, for what it is.

So, they start a new school next week, they will leave their friends and start it all again. I have tried telling them that once they understand change, that anything is possible, that nothing stays the same, and all that, but I can’t help remember those kids who told me all about their world, when I was a kid and wonder how fining parents for taking their kids on holiday was ever a good idea !

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