Every society must develop mechanisms for protecting that part of the population tat needs the greatest help, from children and the aged to women, the ill and disadvantaged, and the most desperately poor. In many parts of the world that protection is provided by people, not the state. Social security is guaranteed by the family, not by a plan or an instituition, as happens in developed countries, where we must pay fro the care of children, our elderly, the weak and ailing, and where we also pay for emotional assistance, even companionship. It also means that in extended families children are the responsabilty not solely of their parents but of their many relatives and, in the larger sense, the village. Borges says that in Africa he photographed a woman who nursed her baby, then passed him to another woman, who also gave him her breast and in turn passed him to a third mother, who fed him and rocked him until he fell asleep.
Children carry their younger brothers and sisters on their backs.
In growing up, my children passed through stage after stage without any dramatic crisis, and when a crisis did arise it was diffused in the context of a large family in which each individual had his or her own problems and there were many people to help. But now that it is lost to us, we should at least admire it and try to preserve it in other societies. There are more women who have never gone farther than a hundred meters in any direction from their huts, others who spend their lives shrouded from head to foot in a mantle with only a hole at the level of their eyes. Everywhere in the world, women are the poorest of the poor. I grew up following a strict code of honor, within a system of traditions that today is considered antiquated.