- Victor Hugo
-Leonardo da Vinci, Notebooks, 1508
- Voltaire
Angor Wat, Cambodia
Grand Canyon, Arizona, United States
Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?
Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne
Angor Wat, Cambodia
Grand Canyon, Arizona, United States
Did you ever stop to think, and forget to start again?
Winnie the Pooh, A.A. Milne
Shadows: The places between darkness and light
“Look round and round upon this bare bleak plain, and see even here, upon a winter’s day, how beautiful the shadows are.
Alas! It is the nature of their kind to be so.
The lovliest things in life are but shadows, and they come and go, and change and fade away…”
- Charles Dickens
Girl peeks out a train window, India
After the earthquake and tsunami, Japan, 2011
Grand Central Terminal, New York

Train Station, Old Delhi, India
”The Sun never knew how wonderful it was until it fell on the wall of a building.”
Louis Kahn, Architect
quoted in the forward of the book,
In Praise of Shadows, Junichiro Tanizaki
Stories about travelers are as old as humankind.
One of the earliest travelers’ tales was Homer’s Odyssey, from 800 B.C.E., the story of Odysseus’ journey home after the Trojan Wars.
Howrah Station, Calcutta, India
From Homer to Dante, Xuanzang , Marco Polo and Cervantes to Halliburton, to Kerouac, Durell, Theroux, Iyer, writers have taken their readers along on their travels, whether the journey is fiction, non-fiction, or a combination of both.
“The traveler sees what he sees.The tourist sees what he has come to see.”
- G. K. Chesterton
He who does not travel does not know the value of men.
– Moorish proverb
“The World is a book, and those who do not travel
read only a page.”
- St. Augustine
Hindu Kush Mountains, Afghanistan
In developing countries one in six children from 5 to 14 years old is involved in child labor.
Ship-breaking yard, Mumbai, India
In the least developed countries, 30 percent of all children are engaged in child labor.
Worldwide, 126 million children work in hazardous conditions, often enduring beatings, humiliation and sexual violence by their employers.
The highest proportion of child laborers is in sub-Saharan Africa, where 26 percent of children (49 million) are involved in work.
An estimated 1.2 million children — both boys and girls — are trafficked each year into exploitative work in agriculture, mining, factories, armed conflict or commercial sex work.
“Child labor and poverty are inevitably bound together, and if you continue to use the labor of children as the treatment for the social disease of poverty, you will have both poverty and child labor to the end of time.” - Grace Abbott
ImagineAsia’s Storybook Project for Afghan Children
The mission of ImagineAsia, a 501c3 non-profit organization, is to work in partnership with local community leaders and regional NGO’s to help students in Afghan communities receive fundamental educational materials and resources.
IA has started to translate Aesop’s fables into Dari for the children of Afghanistan who have never had a book of their own. Translated and illustrated by volunteers, these stories will reach families in remote areas of the country.
For thousands of years the fables have revealed universal truths through simple allegories. The stories often use animals to teach lessons that are easily understood by people of all ages.
Here are some sample pages:
The Lion and the Mouse – illustrated by Jason Melcher
The Boy Who Cried Wolf - illustrated by Kate Raines
Pitcher and the Crow - illustrated by Lois Andersen
An Afghan Folktale – The Silver on the Hearth – illustrated by Kate Harrold
Tortoise and Hare – illustrated by Kate Harrold

The Donkey and its Purchaser – illustrated by Kate Harrold
The Sun and the Wind – illustrated by Annie Zimmerman
The Fox and the Goat – illustrated by Jason Melcher
Sources: http://www.unicef.org, http://www.ilo.org, www.crin.org