Risking life for education!

Can you imagine your younger self go through something like this? For years in remote parts of Nepal, school mornings didn’t begin with backpacks and buses. They began with fear. Children as young as seven clipped themselves onto thin steel cables called tuins and slid across raging rivers like the Trishuli, hundreds of feet below them. One slip meant everything. In villages like Benighat in Dhading district, these crossings weren’t rare stunts. They were routine. Dozens of children crossed every day, sometimes packed into rusted metal baskets, sometimes hanging by their hands. Parents watched, powerless, knowing education came with a real chance of never coming home. The danger wasn’t hypothetical. In 2010, a tuins accident killed five people. Many others were injured over the years. Each incident was a reminder that for these children, going to school meant gambling with their lives. Public outrage and viral footage eventually forced action. By 2016, Nepal began replacing tuins with suspension bridges. By 2018, most major crossings over the Trishuli were upgraded. Progress was made. Lives were saved. But the images still haunt us because they represent something deeper. A world where a child must choose between education and survival is a world that has already failed them.