With all the infrastructure we have in place to get our kids to schools safely, it's a pretty brainless process nowadays. Stop me if this looks familiar: you get them out of bed, get them to brush their teeth and wash, get them dressed, cook them a solid breakfast, and then it's out the door with the lunchbox and jacket before the bus gets there.
It's pretty mindless, right? The thing is, it makes it really easy to forget that plenty of places don't have it anywhere near that easy. There are still tons of places in the world where getting to school is a much, MUCH bigger ordeal than simply getting dressed and catching a school bus. We've all had adults tell us stories about having to "walk ten miles in the snow to school" but the truth is that there are still places where that's a reality.
In other cases, the route to the nearest school is so remote and dangerous that people just can't make the trip for safety reasons. So, when a man from a remote village in India found out that his children wouldn't be able to go to school easily, he took it upon himself to build a path there himself.
Jalandhar Nayak, a vegetable merchant from a remote village in Eastern India, discovered that his three sons took a whopping THREE HOURS each way to navigate the narrow, rocky route to class every day.
There was nobody else in the area to help, as Nayak and his family are the only ones left in the village; the rest of the villagers left for places with access to better roads. So, he picked up his chisel and pickaxe, and started picking up the slack himself.
"My children found it hard to walk on the narrow and stony path while going to their school. I often saw them stumbling against the rocks and decided to carve a road through the mountain so that they can walk more easily," he told News World Odisha.
For two years, Nayak used simple tools to carve a safe laneway for his sons to walk to school, taking a chisel, garden hoe, and pickaxe in order to clear rocks, dirt, underbrush and tree roots from the path. The result was a five mile path.
#EXCLUSIVE #NewsWorldOdisha
— News World Odisha (@newsworldodisha) January 2, 2018
Jalandhar Nayak of #Kandhamal turns the #MountainMan of #Odisha by his expedition of carving a path to his house through 5 mountains; He has managed to carve a 8ft wide road trough 3 mountains so far.#NewsWorldOdisha Discovers The #Manjhi of #Odisha pic.twitter.com/FjCyhXfvBi
He had planned to keep up clearing the route himself, but ultimately the local government caught wind of what was going on and offered to finish it up for him.
"Nayak's effort and determination to cut mountains to build a road left me spellbound," the local administrator, Brundha D, told reporters.
