“Teacher, when are you going on your next trip and coming back to tell us about it?”

Clelia is in fifth grade at a school on the outskirts of Turin, Italy, where I have been teaching for a few years. It isn’t the first time a child in my class has asked me about my other job, as a photojournalist covering stories around the world.

Clelia didn’t know that four days later I would be returning to India, where I would meet children at a primary school very different from hers – a school housed in a single-story shack in the Dharavi slums on the outskirts of Mumbai.

It’s a school with no desks or chairs, no electricity or running water; a tin roof and walls that leak puddles of water onto the floor when it rains, and when the sun shines, make the classroom stiflingly hot. A school where the daily lessons on the floor can only be held near its entrance, which filters in the only source of light from the dirt alley outside, while a small solar panel powers the single fan, and in the corner, a rudimentary bathroom has been carved into the ground. A school where everything speaks to me of injustice and precarity. Yet here too children shout, joke, and smile as they go about their studies and play their games, reminding me that childhood is an ocean – storm-tossed yet indomitable.

When I get back from Mumbai, Clelia and the rest of the class know they will be hearing stories from my travels.

The first time I decided to share my experiences with this class was shortly after returning from work in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Beirut, Lebanon. I don’t know how I expected them to respond. But when I told them about the school at one camp – about the cramped classrooms of children wearing blue smocks, drawing pictures on crumpled sheets of paper, playing on the school roofs, running among the rubble of buildings – I admit, it was a revelation. I hadn’t thought that such a painful or “distant” subject could affect these children so much. I also didn’t realize that recounting this experence to them would reveal to me such a deep and varied world of sensitivity and attention.

The next chance I had to report to the children came after my return from Bhopal, India, where, forty years prior, what remains the world’s worst industrial chemical disaster occurred. I told the children about my work over many weeks, about the testimonies of the survivors, about the rehabilitation clinic for children, and about the slums of the city where hundreds of thousands of people still live in contaminated areas.

After my presentation with words, photographs, and videos, I was again bombarded with questions. But the comment that stunned me most was from Davide, who told me, “I wish I could have been there!”

I asked him what he meant. He replied in the most human way possible, in a way we adults have almost forgotten: “To understand how it feels to be in that place.”

We call this empathy. Or perhaps we could just call it humanity.

The next day, the mother of one of the boys came to thank me. She said that the night before, he had kept his parents listening for an hour as he told them everything he had learned about Bhopal and India.

Later, I would tell my students about meeting lepers in Mumbai and about their incredible lives: their suffering, struggles, and fears; the taboos, the malicious glances of others, the exclusion from their homes, schools, and jobs. I shared an unforgettable image of a woman with her son in her arms, caressing her sore with his finger.

As usual, hands shot up. “Why would you be kicked out of your home if you’re sick?” was the first question. “And why would you hide if you’re not well?”

Opinions came thick and fast, until one child silenced everyone, even me, saying, “No one can know. What’s the point of judging?”

On another occasion, the reaction of my students moved me even more. I had just returned from reporting on the migrants from South and Central America who make the perilous journey through Mexico aboard La Bestia (The Beast), a freight train traversing thousands of miles from Chiapas, in southern Mexico, to the US border at El Paso. At the time, every day hundreds of men, women, and children would cling to the carriages of a train a mile long, crowding between railcars or clutching the roofs. They risked deadly falls, violence, and extortion from drug traffickers, threats of kidnap and rape, hunger, thirst, and exposure to unpredictable elements, never knowing whether they will be sent back once they reach the border. Children have been born on La Bestia, love stories have been born on La Bestia – but people and dreams have also been crushed and killed under La Bestia.

I told my students about my time as a guest of Las Patronas (The Bosses), a group of volunteer women whose farm in the town of La Patrona lies only ten yards from the tracks where La Bestia passes. There, I witnessed the work Las Patronas have been doing for thirty years. Every day, these women prepare enough food and drink for as many as three hundred meals, which they offer to migrants riding the trains, throwing them bottles of water and bags filled with the food. Yes, because the train doesn’t stop in those parts, there is no option but to throw the bags, hoping someone will manage to catch them.

The students listened as I described this small daily gesture of human solidarity, which, for decades, has helped to alleviate, even momentarily, the suffering of people on an exhausting and dangerous journey. At the end of the story, a barrage of questions followed.

“If they are fleeing poverty, why do they have to hide?”

“Why do the police send them back if they won’t have enough to eat where they were born?”

“Why do drug traffickers ask them for money if they are fleeing because they are poor?”

But the question that struck me most in its poignant directness came from a child who simply asked, “What was the thing that upset you the most?”

I replied by talking about the smiles and hopeful looks on the faces of a group of migrants clinging to the train, holding out their hands in the hope that I too could give them something to eat.

I used to think that children couldn’t possibly relate to the lives of people thousands of miles away, lives of suffering and impoverishment unlike anything my students experience in an affluent European suburb. How could they be expected to, in a culture of distraction and entertainment? But when I returned from summer vacation, their new teacher came to see me to tell me that something small, but incredible, had happened. Between July and August, a group of girls had made some small handicrafts and sold them at the local market. They wanted to donate the proceeds to Las Patronas.

Clearly, we are foolish to underestimate the minds of children.

Explaining injustice to young people may be complicated. Whether it’s inhabitants of refugee camps, migrants risking their lives, survivors of a tragedy, or ostracized sick people, there are more factors and historical context than one can hope to convey. Yet the difficulty lies not so much in finding the right words, but in communicating with souls who do not yet know that such injustice exists – that it lives and thrives wherever we humans are, and largely because of us humans. As Gianrico Carofiglio, one of Italy’s bestselling crime writers, says, the work against evil starts within ourselves.

And here we are back to the story that was, in some ways, the hardest for me to convey, most paradigmatic and difficult to reconcile, the one that speaks of injustices suffered by children so like my students – the school with which I began this article. The school that in our eyes hardly exists because there are no desks, no chairs, no classrooms, no blackboards. But it does exist, and it is powerful, necessary, and vital, because school is where a teacher explains and a child learns.

It’s a school of children so similar and yet so different from those who fill the classrooms and corridors of my school in Turin. So vulnerable and yet so powerful, unwilling to take a sheet of paper, a pencil, or a lunch for granted; so eager to learn, to be together, to shout and laugh with all their hearts. Children who seem to know that the step they take each morning from a dirt alley at the heart of this vast slum into a classroom in a shack is a step toward a possibility which, however remote, could one day take them away from there. It could turn their lives around. They may not express it yet, but they sense it.

So I talk about injustice to children, about the lives of other children. I try to do so through their filter, listening to their version of things, hearing from them the effect of an encounter in which I am nothing more than a link. I stand back and watch them as I show them videos and photographs of those happy, focused children on the other side of the world, children so far away yet so close.

As I write this article, schoolchildren in Gaza are trying to connect to their classes from cafes, tents, and shelters, wherever they can find an internet connection, given that most schools have been destroyed or are being used as field hospitals.

The defeat of human beings is war. The defeat of war is the future.

Yet it is as if childhood and youth are mending every day the fabric of that future that our wars and injustices are shredding.