We cannot begin to make real progress in the battle against poverty and malnutrition in Africa until the problem of degraded soil is addressed. That seems almost an insurmountable task at this time in this part of the world, where old customs and new dilemmas are driving people to destroy the increasingly fragile landscape in a daily battle for survival. This is a place where families measure their wealth by the number of children they have, and where each additional child means that much more wood is needed to build a bigger house or to stoke a bigger cooking fire. I tried to persuade my sister. But we have to face it.
People value children very much.
What people say is they want to have many children, in case some die. This is a place where if a man and woman have 10 children, they assume five will die of malaria, measles, diarrhea, or any of the countless other diseases common to the region. It's a place where each flare-up in neighboring civil wars sends thousands of people pouring across the border into peaceful Tanzania, where they immediately chop down trees for fuel and housing. It's a place where people believe that God, not a family's financial situation, determines whether a child goes to school, and where the forests are thought to tell the future. People believe you can determine your life span by burning forest.