Wanna hear some crazy stories?

I've debated whether or not to post these stories, because they will probably weird all of you out and give many the wrong impression. But they are too incredible to not tell everyone, so I'll just give you this notice- These things don't really happen anymore, and if they do it's only vary rarely, please don't think people are going around doing these crazy things to babies. It's not true.

So with student strikes these past couple of weeks I've had more time on my hands then I've ever wanted, and not being able to go anywhere I've chatted a lot with my neighbors. This endless chatting has led to some very interesting stories. And so, I give you these stories in the order that I heard them and I just want you to know that my only reaction was horrified, incredulous laughter, and please don't think I'm a terrible person for that but honestly, how else are you supposed to react?

People here in Africa have a lot of weird superstitions about twins, I've mentioned some of them before, but these are new. First off, people used to think that when you had twins it was unnatural, that they were in fact genies and so people would take the newborn baby twins and toss them out into the brush where the other genies lived. Because they weren't people, they were genies, so they tossed them in the brush.

Next. If a baby was ever born with teeth (thankfully I'm sure this almost never happened), that also was unnatural and they would take the baby and hit it against a tree trunk until it died.

Finally, if a baby was born but in the birthing process the mother died, the people saw the baby as a murderer so they would take the living baby and bury it in a termite mound until it died.

At the end of this while my head reeling from these incredibly horrifying mental images, my neighbors says, 'truly religion has saved many men.' At first I found this to be very confusing, and not at all congruent with that we were talking about, but then I remembered a conversation I had had the day before where my neighbro was telling me that in her village her family was the only Christan family and because of that her father forced his daughters to go to school and threatened to kill anyone who tried to excise his daughters. She said it was only that way because do to his religion he knew that those things were wrong and he wasn't going to follow in those cultural customs. And I believe that same thinking goes for the twin baby killings. So thanks religion, while there can be negative things said for your influence in Africa, I will wholeheartedly thank you for saving tons of twin babies lives.