Shaojue County, Sichuan Province, southwest China - Recent
1. Various of Liangshan Prefecture, Atuleer Village
2. Students walking on cliff
3. SOUNDBITE (Chinese) Apijiti, CPC committee secretary of Zhiermo Township, Shaojue County (starting with shot 2):
"This road we are walking on is nearly four kilometers long with rattan ladders in 13 places. There are also dangerous sections that need to pass wire cables."
4. Students climbing cliff
5. Various of students, parents, climbing mountain
6. Bamboo ladder
7. Various of students climbing on cliff
8. Various of students, parents, taking break
9. Parent holding rope fastened on waist of child
10. People resting
11. Mountain
12. Various of people live in Atuleer Village
13. Mountain

Children from a mountain village need to climb over dangerous cliffs and picked up by their parents every time they go to and back from school in the Liangshan Yi Autonomous Prefecture in southwest China's Sichuan Province.

To address the situation, the local authority of the county said they plan to build a stairway with steel bar construction first to guarantee the safety of children and villagers, then make out a thorough project to completely solve the traffic problem.

A work team has been sent to the village to investigate condition for the stairway.

The children are from the Atuleer Village of Shaojue County of the prefecture perched on a cliff with an absolute altitude of about 1,500 meters. A a total of 358 people from 76 families live in this highland village.

Though there are three approaches to the village, for most of the time the villagers can only use the two paths over the perpendicular steep cliffs, about 800 meters from the ground.

"This path we are walking on is nearly four kilometers long with bamboo ladders in 13 places. There are also dangerous sections that need to pass wire cables," said Apijiti, secretary of the CPC committee of Zhiermo Township of Shaojue County.

Due to the difficult traffic condition, these children have a special schedule -- having lessons for ten days, then a five-day break.

Liangshan is one of the poverty-stricken prefectures in China. With financial support from the provincial government, two third of the population in Atuleer of Shaojue have got rid of poverty.

For the present, to build a road will coast one third of the county's whole fiscal revenue, which is unpractical since there are also many other problems to solve in this region.

However, the local governments have showed their determination to help the villagers.