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I feel bad just reading this, we failed as civilisation so badly. Apart from short term help, I think these people need education - how could both growing up hungry, living in famine and having children at 13 seem like a good idea is beyond me.

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Afaik it makes perfect sense in a third-world country: There is no social security net so your only security is your children taking care of you when you get old / become unable to work. Probably there is a high chance some of these children will either not grow up to take care of them, or not grow up at all. Solution: hedge your bet by having as many children as possible.

If people stopped having kids every time there was a famine, there'd be nobody here. History is littered with war, disease, and famine, and yet people have been born throughout it. Maybe it wouldn't have seemed a good idea to have kids during the cold war (impending nuclear apocalypse), the spanish flu, WW2, the dustbowl, the great leap forward, the civil war, various genocides of the past century, etc.

And yet, in most cases, the survivors and descendants are better off, not worse off, than the people of the time.

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