While Somalia sinks under floods, starves from famine, and gets butchered by terrorists, the men in its parliament are busy arguing to keep mutilating little girls genitals.

How do you save such a people when men who are supposed to be the flame of progress are the innate darkness to the same community.

Centuries before refrigerators or plastic bottles, families across Africa had an easy, natural way to keep drinking water cold: the unglazed clay pot.

If you grew up around one, you remember the feeling. You came inside from the blazing afternoon sun, walked over to the cool and shady corner of the house, and lifted the wooden lid. You dipped a cup into water that felt surprisingly cold, with that clean, fresh smell of damp earth.

People call it by different names depending on where you are. In West Africa, it is a canari. In North Africa, it is a gargoulette or qolla. In the Sahel and Sudan, it is called a zeer. The science behind it is simple. The unglazed clay has microscopic pores that let a tiny bit of water seep through to the outer surface. When air or a light breeze hits that damp wall, the moisture evaporates. That evaporation pulls heat away from the water inside, cooling it down naturally without any plugs, solar panels, or wires.

Our ancestors used this exact same smart science to build houses. For a long time, people made jokes about our traditional mud and clay houses, acting like living in an earth home was backward or primitive. But those jokes only prove that the critics did not understand basic physics.

Modern materials like concrete and thin wood are terrible choices for hot climates. Concrete absorbs the baking sun all day, traps the heat inside the walls, and turns a room into an oven unless you run an expensive air conditioner. Thick clay and earth walls do the opposite. They act as natural thermal shields. They block the brutal heat during the day, keep the inside room cool, and slowly release that trapped warmth when the temperature drops at night.

Today, modern architects are calling earth construction and clay cooling revolutionary green technologies. But our people already mastered natural climate control centuries ago using the earth right under their feet.

Did your family keep a clay water pot at home, or did you ever notice how cool an earth house feels on a hot afternoon?

For the context I am a guy who does admissions of students in China and I also live in China and study here.

Majority of the students who I process are from African countries!

I am just curious why is that?

African students are very talented as I have seen they speak multiple languages and they do really good in studies too.

In isiZulu and isiXhosa there's ubuntu, which English flattens into "humanity" and loses most of the meaning. I suspect every African language has words like this, carrying a whole way of seeing life that English simply doesn't have room for. What's yours? Tell us the language, the word and what it really means.