day 21

Today there was the funeral of my grandma and I'd like to talk about families. She was widowed quite young, when my father was 17 and yet she managed to raise two great people like my father and my aunt. 

Here situations of families without a father are very common, but for different reasons. This morning I asked my students to write something about their family: their names, their jobs and their siblings. Since they're young, just 8 years old, they see some situations from a naive point of view or they simply lie when they don't know what to say. Some of them see their father just sometimes during the year, others say he lives somewhere else and others simply don't have one. Many have siblings from different fathers and some were not even sure about their names.

It's not uncommon at all here for girls to have their first kids very young, often when 13 years old. It's true that here people become adult much earlier compared to Europe, and often around 11 they're already working to help their parents, but such situations are the results of poverty and hope (or we could call it desperation). Girls sleep with guys for little money or they simply hope some men can give them a better life. Then they find themselves alone with a poor kid to feed. I for one don't have a solution but I think that with better education starting at school, they could provide help, making people more aware of the consequences and of the ways to, at least, avoid unwanted pregnancies.