Reading. The world’s largest family (Elem)

The world’s largest family

A

In the mountains of northern India near Bangladesh, there is a very unusual family. They all live together in the same house, and they spend a lot of time together. Every day, the men in the family look after their animals and the food they are growing, but they always return home for meals. The women do the cooking and cleaning. And there is a lot of cooking! Why? Well, this is the world’s largest family. Their home has four floors and a hundred rooms, but it is very crowded!

B

Ziona is in his seventies, and he is the head of the world’s biggest family. He got married to his first wife Zathiangi when he was seventeen and she was twenty, but he didn’t stop there. Amazingly, today, he has thirty-nine wives and more children and grandchildren than any other person in the world, and he says that he doesn’t want to stop getting married or having kids! One of his sons told us that Ziona married most of his wives because they were poor, and he wanted to be kind and to help them. That’s why the family has got larger and larger. In the family’s religion, a man can marry any woman he wants to.

C

In the house, everybody looks after Ziona, but it seems that the women make most of the decisions. To make sure there is enough food for the family each day, the oldest wife, Zathiangi, has to organise all the other mothers to prepare over thirty chickens for dinner. There are ninety-four people to feed in the family, including Ziona and all his wives, children and grandchildren. It can’t be easy to remember all the names!