A LIFE LIKE MINE: How Children Live Around the World

Dorling Kindersley in association with UNICEF, pound;14.99

There are two billion people under the age of 18. Their interests should be enshrined in the Convention on the Rights of the Child, but governments do not always perform what they promise - 100 million youngsters, for example, are involved in dangerous or full-time work rather than getting an education. A Life Like Mine takes us through the principles of the convention and measures them against the actuality of the lives of many different children. Mixing anecdotes, quotations, statistics, questions and hundreds of photographs, it offers an informative balance of optimism and realism.

The book has four parts. “Survival” illustrates how the basic needs of water, food, health and shelter are met or not met (four pictures from the “water” section are pictured below). We meet Nou in Laos using the new village pump and then realise that of the four other children shown, only Najaha in the Netherlands doesn’t have to leave home to get a drink. A Vietnamese family pulls fish from a teeming lake, while Vincent in Rwanda has to grow vegetables to ensure his orphaned siblings survive: both his parents are dead. Two types of mobile home are juxtaposed - a circus trailer in England and a Sudanese twig hut carried by camels.

“Development” looks at education and play. It examines various reasons why girls are kept from attending school, but also offers hope in the story of Maria in Afghanistan, who happily walks 30 minutes to reach the classes she was previously forbidden to attend. The serious business of play ranges from chess in the Ukraine and football in Peru to jigsaw puzzles in the Philippines. Michael, living on a remote cattle station in the Australian outback, shows how deprivation can be the lot of the affluent as well as the poor. He can only talk to his teacher over a two-way radio and the friend to whom he chats after school lives nearly 400 miles away.

“Protection” brings together the topics of love, care, work and war. There’s a difference between Douglas helping out on the family farm in Britain and Rosita harvesting wheat by hand in Ecuador. The difficult concept of “exploitation” is subtly defined through several other stories like this. Sudan, Rwanda, Angola and Kosovo echo shamefully through the section on conflict.

Finally, “Participation” illuminates the idea of personal iden-tity. Children talk about the meanings of their names, their religion and their sense of belonging to a nation or a community. These are all seen to be potential sources of the worst kinds of hatred and cruelty, but the last words, as is right in a book for children, are those of “dreams, wishes, hope, happiness”. The book makes its small contribution towards providing them with a true meaning.