More than 50 children in the village of Arab Shams in the Sharqiyah governorate found out that Tales Ride, a bus that drives through Egypt to give free books to children, was going to visit their village on May 17. The children were excited about attending an interesting storytelling session run by the owner of the vehicle, English teacher Haitham al-Sayyed.

When that day came, Sayyed and a group of children between the ages of 5 and 12 escaped the hot sun and sat in the shade of a big tree along the edges of a field. The children sat in a circle listening to tales they had never heard before, but the highlight of their day was when each child got a storybook of their own, carefully selected by Sayyed according to the children's ages and interests.

The cultural gap between children living in villages and their counterparts in the cities prompted Sayyed to take his own vehicle and roam around the villages of his governorate, hoping to bridge that gap. Sayyed told Al-Monitor that since he was brought up in one of the villages in Faqous, in Sharqiyah governorate, he noticed that the knowledge areas that were available for him and his peers were far less than the ones available for children in big cities. He attributed this gap to the fact that cities have cultural centers while villages only have school libraries, which are rarely visited by children and only include books that date back dozens of years.

Sayyed noticed that the area where he lived included 20 villages with 40,000 residents and no public or private cultural center. Meanwhile, cultural centers in cities only organize events at night, which makes it impossible for children from the villages to attend in light of the long distances and the absence of transportation at night. According to Sayyed, this resulted in a decline in the children’s cultural knowledge.