http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/new...SS&attr=797093
Ten years ago, John Wood was a highflyer. As director of business development in China for Microsoft, the computer giant, he lived in expat luxury in Beijing with an equally highflying girlfriend. His rent was paid for him, and he flew everywhere business class. He had two drivers, a full-time housekeeper and an enormous salary.
“It was a very good life,” he says softly. “But it was leaving me empty.”
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In April 1998, Wood, then 34, took a three-week walking holiday in Nepal. It was the longest holiday he’d taken in nine years: a reward to himself for his high-stress career.
On his first day of vacation he struck up a conversation with a Nepali man whose job it was to find resources for 17 schools. Wood was astonished when he learnt that Nepal’s illiteracy rate was 70%, among the world’s highest.
Intrigued, and keen to learn about “the real Nepal rather than the trekker’s version”, he visited a rural school. There he found the room marked “library” completely empty. The few books in the school (a Dan-ielle Steel romance, an Umberto Eco novel in Italian, the Lonely Planet guide to Mongolia) were under lock and key, considered so precious that the teachers did not want to risk them being damaged by the children.
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