Youth filled country

Namibia is a super young country, population wise. Something like 50% or some ridiculous number are younger than 30. The life expectancy here is around 50 years old, so leadership turns over quickly.  It's sort of like a summer camp, on a country-wide scale, where leadership ages-out soon after they reach the point of understanding the system well enough to really make a difference. 

And babies are everywhere. It will be interesting to see what happens here as life expectancy (hopefully) increases. I hope birth control becomes more normalized. And we need to get rid of hospitals that don’t give it out. That’s just not OK here. When health risks associated with pregnancy are so high, and socially, girls often feel the need to have sex with sugar daddies. At least socially, it’s not completely ostracizing to have a baby out of wedlock. Many of the teachers here had children when they were very young, but are not married.  They even found ways to finish school and become highly qualified teachers, which is really cool.  

I was talking to one of the teachers, who is from Zimbabwe, and he said that single parenting is not as common there.  I was hoping that it was because Zimbabwe is more up-to-date with their birth control methods, but it is more due to social pressure from families to marry once you have created a pregnancy. Parents of the baby-daddy strongly encourage him to marry the mother in Zim, because “she is someone else's child, and doing that to someone else’s child means you need to help her.” I kind of like it because it doesn't put all of the "blame" for the pregnancy on the mother, but the forced marriage thing is not ideal in my mind.  But I’m glad the dads and their families are involved and supporting the child’s life.  I'm often impressed at how many single dads I meet, and how well they look after and care about their children, here in Namibia.