A photographic exhibition held on Monday, March 4, at the United Nations, New York, featured "Journeys to School" - a compilation of photographs, which portrayed students' commute to their schools.
At the exhibition, it was revealed that a Bronx High School of Science student, who lives in Queens, travels the farthest from his home everyday to reach school. The journey includes two bus trips, two subway trips and a ten minute walk as well!
According to the New York Post, Santiago Munoz, a 14-year-old ninth grader, lives in the outskirts of Rockaway, Queens, and wakes up at 5 a.m. in the morning to leave home by six. He boards the Q22 bus, which he takes to the Q53 or Q52. He then rides either one of the buses that conveys him to the Rockaway Boulevard A-train Station. He rides the train to Manhattan to get off at Fulton Street and boards an uptown 4 train to Bedford Park Boulevard and then walks ten minutes to finally reach school.
The whole commute takes between two hours 20 minutes to two hours 40 minutes, up and down, depending on transit operations. Totally, on an average, Munoz travels more than five hours, to and from school.
Munoz's journey outdoes the commute of a Brazilian 6-year-old boy, who saddles up a donkey everyday to cover an hour's distance, crossing a desert landscape in Sertao. Another 6-year-old girl in Kenya crosses a dangerous neighborhood in an hour-long walk.
The exhibition was jointly put together by UNESCO, the Sipa Press and Veolia Transdev, an international private-public transport operator. The whole motive of the exhibition was to portray the importance of education and how children from unaccesible areas travel to school despite the hardships they face while travelling.
Check out the pictures and the story behind each one of them in the video below:
