Children See a New World of Moon Walks, Mars Fun

On a day deep in the 21st century, Rohan Manocha awakes and reads the newspaper on the Internet. He eats a capsule for breakfast, takes a hydroelectric bath and then goes for a walk on the moon.

His children, meanwhile, are at school, using laptops instead of notebooks and writing to pen pals on Pluto. Their clothing is air-conditioned and protects them from pollution. After school, they go to movies at malls in outer space.

That evening, Rohan takes his kids to a carnival on Mars. He knows the Red Planet well; a lawyer, he fights “cases for the Martians on Mars.”

Of course, foresight is rarely 20-20. In 1999, Rohan is just 11 years old, a student at the Amity International School in the New Delhi suburb of Noida, where he likes to study and play tennis. Maybe he will walk on the moon. Maybe not.

But a boy can dream.

The dreams of the third millennium are being dreamed now, by children at Kyobashi Tsukiji Elementary School in Tokyo, at Narciso Mendoza Elementary School in Nezahualcoyotl near Mexico City, at Fernbank Elementary School in Atlanta, at Olympic Primary School in Nairobi, Kenya.

Ten, 11 or 12 years old, they have every reason to believe that they will see the bulk of the 21st century; with luck and some medical advances, they may very well see the dawn of the 22nd.

And as Associated Press reporters learned while visiting their classrooms, from India to Israel, they see tomorrow vividly--expressing their visions in tumbling words and hopeful drawings that show themselves grown up and smiling, the sun rising over secure neighborhoods, the earth as the bright flower on a healthy green stem.

As you might expect, when they look into the future, many imagine a Jetsonian world--a Hovercraft in every garage and robots everywhere, split-second trips to other planets, pills that fill your stomach.

But their future is a reflection of their present. Around them, many see war, lawlessness, disease--and, especially, a world that is poisoning itself. Reflecting on that, they veer from youthful optimism to bleak pessimism.

Listen to Tomoka Hayashi, 12, of Tokyo:

“We will use too much power and one day we can no longer use any electric appliances and there will be an explosion and people die. . . . Then we will start living with nature and start cooperating.”

But perhaps, she adds, we can change--switch paper milk cartons for glass and slow the cutting of forests. “There may be a chance that people will become more aware of nature and our problems and start recycling.”

Gosha Khusainov, a 10-year-old student at School No. 57 in Moscow, just a couple of blocks from the Kremlin, doubts it: “I think the world’ll be worse, because it’ll be very cold. It’ll be less trees and grass, all days will be like evening, and only at night it’ll be like now.”

As the natural world shrinks, Anat Avraham, a 10-year-old fifth-grader at Frankel Elementary School in Jerusalem, sees a time when people will share their homes with bears (“bears who don’t eat people,” she explains).

“My children will have lots of animals but they will barely see any nature. In my opinion, there won’t be any [nature] then. I will try to help animals, especially panda bears who are endangered. I will try to prevent the death of fish.”

When fifth-grader Ethan Sawyer of Atlanta grows up, he expects to study Amazon rain forest ecology “on an acre of land, all that is left of the world’s rain forests.”

Not that tomorrow will be entirely bad. Ethan says he will sleep just two hours a day, because “some gizmo” will make his sleep more efficient. He will eat “little pills filled with energy frappes. I don’t think anyone will work in factories because robots will do all the work.”

But he agrees that wildlife will be imperiled, and Ethan loves animals--”I adore otters. I’m obsessed with otters.” He hopes “that we will be able to save the animals. We may have to create new species. I don’t know how, but there may be a way.”

Dasha Marynova of Moscow thinks it can happen. “I want to study zoology and become a biologist because I’d like to deal with new animals, study them and meet tiger-leopards, mouse-owls, elephant-cockroach-spiders, snake-frog-crocodiles,” Dasha says.

Dasha sees a sunny future, full of airborne electric trains and special machines “that collect snow from the roads and don’t sprinkle them with salt, which ruins your shoes.”

“Someone will invent a time machine, and people can be in the past, in the future, in the present. It will be much more interesting than simply going to school or playing. I also hope the time machine will return my grandfather, who died a few years ago,” she says.

Dasha is 10 years old; she has a 20-year-old sister, Masha, and a 14-year-old brother, Alyosha. In the future according to Dasha, Alyosha will not go into the army--now enmeshed in fighting in Chechnya.

In that same future, the crime that has plagued post-communist Russia will be no more. Dasha wants to believe “that murders will stop, that there won’t be people in prison, but that the police will arrest people on other planets for robbery.”

Maria del Pilar Guzman Sanches is also 10; she likes to spend her time playing with Barbies, curling her eyelashes and painting her lips in her home in Mexico. But she too lives in a world scarred by lawlessness, and imagines a world without it.

“No pollution, no kidnappers, no drunks, no drug addicts, no cocaine addicts or sexual violence or violence against the authorities,” she says.

“I see the news and they say they stole some children,” Maria says. “It makes me sad and I wouldn’t like that to happen to me or to my children or to my grandchildren or to my great-grandchildren.”

Simon Mwangi wants to be a policeman when he grows up--unless he becomes an engineer or a meteorologist.

He lives in Nairobi and foresees a time when Kenya “will be very industrialized and there will not be things like crimes. The police will be everywhere, like five policemen” in a housing compound.

One night last June, 15 armed, masked men invaded his house, tied up his parents and robbed them. When they entered his bedroom, Simon screamed. A watchman came running; the bandits shot and killed him.

Simon wants to invent “a robot which, if things come to your house, it can demolish all of them . . . it can catch them and take them to police.”

Simon is 12 years old; he attends Olympic Primary School, set on a low hill overlooking corrugated metal roofs. Goats munch on clumps of grass at the edges of the dirt that surrounds the school.

His classmate, Esther Auma, is appalled by poverty. “People die of hunger, many things. There is no unity. You can find somebody is feasting [on] a lot of meat, chicken, and somebody is dying of hunger and he or she is throwing [the food away]. There is no love.”

In the future, “There will be love. People will be working in groups. There will be no corruption.”

In India, 11-year-old Prachi Shrivastava sees people begging on the roads. She envisions a luxurious future--”the poorest person having a luxury flat and the middle class having a big, beautiful, computerized bungalow. The richest should have their own colony.”

“As I would be a very, very rich person”--she expects to live in the penthouse of a 1,000-story building--”I would have powers to reach to the government and tell them to help make my dream come true.”

There are other dreams, of course. When Jo Warren of Atlanta was 9, she blacked out, and she was taken to the hospital.

“For every few seconds of black, I would have a half of a second of sight. Until, finally, everything blacked out and the only thing I could hear was the IV beeping. And then, it was all gone. Nothing.” When she regained consciousness, they told her she had diabetes.

Now her fondest wish for the future is “the cure for diabetes, though that is one of many wishes.”

Emmanuel Pastor Bartolo Rangel of Mexico wants to be a doctor someday. In the future, “people won’t die as fast” and there will be no AIDS or hepatitis or diabetes. His grandmother’s death, from cancer, left him very sad: “I’d want that sickness not to exist.”

Others dream of world peace.

“Wars should be stopped. . . . I can’t stand it when I see people die in front of the camera,” says Stefan S., 12, a sixth-grader at the Schule am Griebnitzsee in Potsdam, Germany. (Authorities there would not allow students’ last names to be used.)

“I would like to be a peacemaker,” says Benjamin Mbithi of Kenya.

“When the wars come, I’ll just go with my group and . . . make peace,” says this tall, solemn 11-year-old. “I’ll help those people who would have lost their legs or arms by giving those artificial legs. And those people who are having famine, I will go and support their areas with food.”

He will be “a big man and well known by many people.”

Not all children have such grand ambitions--and not all of the children embrace the future and all the changes it entails.

Twelve-year-old Maximilian S. of Germany wants to be a seaman. “To keep watch with the captain at night by rough seas and to listen to the sound of the 9,000-horsepower diesel engine is so overwhelming.

“But who knows if there will still be cargo ships in the future, as the romance of seafaring is disappearing with technological progress.”

For most, though, the future is magnificent. Their words rush, describing the fun ahead:

“Electronic clothes that make us dance,” says Prachi Shrivastava of New Delhi.

“The hobby will be lion riding, tiger riding,” says her classmate Astha Gupta.

“All subjects are in a helmet and if you put it on, the content goes into your head so you won’t have to study,” says Takafuii Masuo of Tokyo.

“Flying cars, flying trains, hotels in space, time machines, airplanes that fly at the speed of light, and cities under the ocean,” says Natasha Savranskaya of Atlanta.

“Maybe a park like Disneyland will be created in Israel,” says Guy Shimon of Jerusalem.

In the future, says Simon Mwangi of Nairobi, “I hope that Kenya will start snowing like in places like Canada.”

In the future, says 10-year-old Tal Malcha of Jerusalem, “there will be transportation for kids, maybe they will work themselves and drive cars or become astronauts.”

“Maybe,” he says, “they will even run the world.”

This story was reported by Judith Ingram in Moscow; Dina Kraft in Jerusalem; Chisaki Watanabe in Tokyo; Maurice Frank in Potsdam, Germany; Niko Price and Julie Watson in Nezahualcoyotl, Mexico; Susan Linnee and Dianna Cahn in Nairobi; Hema Shukla in Noida, India; and Jerry Schwartz in Atlanta.