This picture is taken on Gran’s lawn. See the bump in the background.
Galla women, indeed all women in most of the countryside in Ethiopia during the time I lived there, had no way of birth control. So unless they had a husband who was prepared to have no sexual activity with them at certain moments in their life, they would have many children.
I do remember talking to them about this but not very successfully. We had a medical centre at Mulu and there were Ethiopian nurses there who tried to sell the idea of contraception methods to them to practice it.
So apart from their monthly periods which they could prolong with an husband, they ended up having far too many children. And of course, a lot of these babies died from malnutrition. In the picture, you can see the tufts of hair on the children’s heads. These were there so that the angels from heaven could pull them up to everlasting life if they died at a very young age