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when I got back to Africa and I was hired as a consultant ... I looked at how cultural
psychology plays a more important role in development than money.
the bus company had installed a family-planning program that wasn't working. It wasn't working
at all. So I went to talk to them, to find out what was the problem. They said to me,
in that particular meeting, that the idea was that it was not Islamic for them to have
family planning. I was able to tell them, as a change specialist, in the meeting, that
it's not the idea of being Islamic or not Islamic; the idea is, according to the Koran
and Koranic law, between the first child and the second child, should be thirty months.
That's law.
Traditionally, before, in African societies, Senegalese society, when a woman had a child,
she went back to her home place, with her parents, and she nursed that child for twenty-four
months, before she came back to her husband. So it was natural family planning... I said,
"You all should start sending your wives away -- according to the law."... the next day
everybody's wife was at the Family Planning Clinic.