Up to the West Point government school where the school library houses twenty-five books.
Up again to the room which, like the library, they show off to visitors, maybe because unlike all the others the 1200 kids use it is not made of tin and includes chairs and desks.
Up? Is not “up” only a direction when the head of the school can point to the office of the local education department whose office window overlooks her school, an office which tells her who she must and what job those people must do (qualifications are irrelevant) since this is how whichever party is in power practices the standard corruption and nepotism?
says she should hire, that and conditions of no concern to the
Up from the school's bowels (it is actually built, hovel-like, into the side of a hill) to that library and classroom, you walk through dilapidation and poverty even a middle-class local calls “deplorable” and yet also, unfathomably, through a sea of smiling, shiny, children.
Up from West Point School to a bookstore with ten times the capacity of the library, but which, nevertheless, serves as a meeting place for young readers and college-aged intellectuals and entrepreneurs.
Up from that first day to the international school that brought me here, where a proper building (sort of), a flooded football pitch (about which everyone complains), dorm rooms that leak and a host of other indignities even an impoverished school in America would not allow and which you simply could not find anywhere in The Netherlands.
Yet up there you finally crest and get to a place where you can look over something rather than up alone, where, too, the kids treat each other with more beauty than at any school you have ever known.