Malian: How many older brothers do you have?
Me: Just a sister. And I'm the youngest.
Malian: So only two?
Me: That's right.
Malian: And no boys?
Me: Nope.
Malian: And your parents don't want any boys?
Me: Well, it's not an issue of not wanting boys, it's more that it just...didn't happen.
Malian: And your parents are okay with this?
Me: Well, what's so wrong with two kids, both of them girls?
Usually, the Malian at this point is reeling, and sooner or later comes to the "Why don't white people like children?" question.
But what makes me equally angry is talking to westerners, to non-Africans in Bamako or the States, who might make the opposite statement: "Why do families have so many kids, in fact, more kids than they can possibly afford, given they are so poor?"
As a health volunteer, who has many conversations about family planning, you simply cannot have a conversation about family without coming up against these two attitudes, one the Malian view of family, the other, the American. Neither is entirely true. Rather, each attitude is coming from entirely different contexts, and given those contexts, the attitudes and resultant actions do make sense.
For Malians, whenever a woman gets married, everyone gives them blessings for lots of kids: "you're going to have kids, lots of kids, even twins!" I was first confused why everyone was telling me I was going to have twins when I got married: the first thing I would think of when having twins is how much harder it would be--two children to breastfeed, two sets of clothes to buy, money being spent at twice what you anticipated. When pressed why Malians told me this, women usually say "well, God has provided...Children are a blessing from God!" I would look at children and immediately start calculating the expenses associated with raising that kid. If that makes me anti-family or that children are any less than a gift from God, I'm not sure. But I don't think I'm alone in seeing kids and then seeing money being spent on unnegotiable expenses.
I gradually realized this is the key difference: for people in Mali, and much of the developing world, children are seen as making more money than they cost. David Werner explains the attitude in Helping Health Workers Learn. By age five or six, most boys are responsible for bringing in the animals at the end of the day, and girls, watching the younger children and washing dishes. By ten or eleven, boys are field hands, while girls haul water and help pound millet or cook while mothers are out selling food at markets. Sure, you need to feed and clothe your helpers, but kids do an awful lot of work without being paid.
More importantly in Mali, kids are seen as a form of social securtiy. In the U.S., once you retire, you earn a small pension. Additionally, most people save money every year they work so that once you're too old to work , there's money in the bank. I've explained this foreign concept to many Malians--foreign because there is no formal pension or way to save money if you're the average Malian. Rather, children are required to give their parents money and food once they are too old to farm. The biggest fear of Malians is to be old and have no children to come give them money or food, only relying on the village to take care of them.
Finally, children are seen as continuing the family in an uncertain world. Malians are shocked that I have no brothers, exclaiming, "you must have children, otherwise, your family will be lost!!" Things happen in the developing world--accidents, malaria, any number of unexpected tragedies. When you are a farmer with little to no education, kids are your greatest form of security, of knowing that even if something happens to you, your own kids are there to take care of your parents or each other.
So how does one talk about family planning in a Malian context? First, we don't call it "birth control." Like I've stated previously, control or agency is not something felt very strongly by Malians. Things do or don't happen because God has accepted them as such, which includes everything from having a safe trip to having lots of kids. Telling a Malian to control the number of kids they have, especially a white person telling them this, ushers in the "white people don't like kids" statement.
Spacing births is something that makes sense to a Malian woman. I despise the teaching tools that are made for health educators, a picture of a Malian family with two kids, both well dressed and who go to school. Sure, it's a great vision, buy you can tell that it was made by white people trying to have Mali become the nuclear family that is the Western World. Rather, I tell the women in my village, "you want to have four kids? Five kids? Fine, I'm not going to sit here and tell you to only have two kids like some Western family. But I am going to tell you to wait until the first child isn't breastfeeding before you become pregnant again, meaning at least two years between pregnancies, if not three." Having lots of kids in itself isn't a bad thing, but becoming pregnant every year and weaning your first child early is a bad thing. And I can give them plenty of analogies to support that: planting crops too close together yields poorer growth. Likewise, having children too close together means each child doesn't grow as well. Using the same grain sacks year after year, filling them full with grain wears them out to the point that they rip. Likewise, a woman's body bearing a child every year simply wears out and cannot do as much work.
To truly change the way people think about kids, Mali needs to economically change: people need to have enough faith that they can save money for retirement, and that kids can finish school and later make money through work, not leave school early to provide food for the family. Sure, there's a viable arguement that having only as many kids as you can afford will help. But there is a case to be made that poverty is the cause of large families, and not the Western attitude that poverty is the effect of large families. This attitude is hidden in the "don't breed them if you can't feed them" mentality. Distributing condoms, birth control pills, and depo-provera injections will not have nearly as large an impact on family planning as an economic system in which people think they have a chance to make money and have a secure future.
My job I feel, where Mali is right now, is not to sit here and tell women to have two children and to send them all to school since I think education is the only way to break out of subsistence farming. Rather, my role is help women access how they can safely have an many children as they
chose.
