If you can't barely feed your kids, you shouldn't have more. not as drastic as china's one child policy but a sane policy where you shouldn't have tons of kids.


Today, the big children will eat, Cynthia, 15, and Guellor, 13. Tomorrow, it will be the turn of the little ones, Bénédicte, Josiane and Manassé, 3, 6, and 9.

Of course, the small ones will fuss. “Yes, sure, they ask for food, but we don’t have any,” said their mother, Ghislaine Berbok, a police officer who earns $50 a month. There will have been a little bread for them at breakfast, but nothing more.

“At night they will be weak,” she said. “Sure, they complain. But there is nothing we can do.”

The Berboks are practicing a Kinshasa family ritual almost as common here as corrugated metal roofs and dirt streets: the “power cut,” as residents in this capital of some 10 million have ironically christened it. On some days, some children eat, others do not. On other days, all the children eat, and the adults do not. Or vice versa.

The term “power cut” — in French, délestage — is meant to evoke another unloved routine of city life: the rolling blackouts that hit first one neighborhood, then another.

Délestage is universally used in French-speaking Africa to describe these state-decreed power cutoffs, but when applied to rationing food it illustrates a stark survival calculus, one the head of a household must painfully impose on the rest. And unlike the blackouts, it is not merely a temporary unpleasantness mandated from on high.

“If today we eat, tomorrow we’ll drink tea,” said Dieudonné Nsala, a father of five who earns $60 a month as an administrator at the Education Ministry. Rent is $120 a month; the numbers, Mr. Nsala pointed out, simply do not add up. Are there days when his children do not eat? “Of course!” Mr. Nsala answered, puzzled at the question. “It can be two days a week,” he said.


http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/03/world/africa/in-congolese-capital-power-cut-applies-to-food.html?_r=1&ref=world

 

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adpot?

Just add pot? It makes everything better?

 

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No, because then you'd need more food

Chinas 1 child policy is horrible and didn't work out very well.

Also, I hate when people see this and think "jeeze what a dumbass having so many kids" rather than "ou mean he is a ****ing POLICE OFFICER and makes 50 bucks a month??"

I must say, I like you in general, but I really REALLY hate your attitude towards poor people. Let's focus on the countries that played a hand in places like that being a profanity rather than judging the victims of it.

I might care that he only makes $50 a month if he cared enough about his children to not have had them in that rathole country he is from. If you can't support the friggen children stop sticking your dick in everything that moves.

China is a model for the world to follow. I have always wanted to wear peasant garb and grow rice or work in a toy factory wedging those toys into plastic holders and locking them down with those twist ties.

I blame colonialism and imperialism for the ridiculously high birth rates of many African nations. I don't need a rational nexus.

 

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they could adopt it, but enforcing it would be impossible.

 

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Because a population decline spells horrible economic mishaps?