Cloud Tea Monkeys

"My own specialty is women globally and I do a lot of work on women in poor countries. This book focuses on a woman who is very poor. She is in a South Asian country and she picks tea leaves for a living. Her daughter is either too young to go to school or they cannot afford to send her to school, so the daughter often comes along to the plantation. But one day the mother gets very sick and she can no longer pick tea. The daughter is worried that there is no money to pay for the doctor, she really despairs, and ultimately ends up dragging this enormous tea basket to the plantation to try and do the work herself. The overseer is really an angry, mean boss, and he just laughs at her. “You can get a picture book by a high-profile person, teaching traditional financial topics for a young child to understand” And then the fantasy kicks in. The young girl goes and cries in the woods next to the tea plantation and some monkeys end up filling the tea basket, with the best tea in the world, Cloud Tea. The emperor of this country loves the tea and after that, every year, the mother and her daughter get a bag of coins from the emperor for this magical tea. It’s a lovely story. It shows some of the very real poverty that we see in developing countries, but there’s a touch of magic in it, that it’s all going to be OK. So this book really touched my heart. I’ve read it to a number of classes and by the end the children are clapping – they love the story. They are beautiful illustrations. That’s the nice thing with these picture books. I’m often looking at the text, the economics in the narrative, but the pictures really help to make or break a book. Yes. There are several lessons, and income inequality is definitely one of them. But also, here in the US, often kids don’t like school. A lesson is to teach our kids how fortunate they are to be in school, because in some countries children are so poor they cannot go to school – the family cannot afford the fees, or the children actually have to work to support the family."