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Reader question: Please explain “it takes a village” in this passage (what “village”?): You see, Hillary understands that the President is about one thing and one thing only – it’s about leaving something better for our kids. That’s how we’ve always moved this country forward – by all of us coming together on behalf of our children -- folks who volunteer to coach that team, to teach that Sunday school class because they know it takes a village. My comments: That was American First Lady Michelle Obama speaking on Monday at the Democratic National Convention making a case for former first lady Hillary Clinton to be the next President. Appropriately, Obama used the expression “it takes a village” because some years ago, Hillary Clinton wrote a book by that exact title, which, in fact, helped to popularize the phrase. Appropriately on another level, both Obama and Clinton are mothers who have brought up children – successfully, too, you might say, by any measure. Appropriate because “it takes a village” is believed to a shortened form of the saying “it takes a village to raise a child”. Many believe this saying, or proverb originates in Africa or somewhere among American Indian tribes. Whatever the case, the idea remains the same and easily understandable. The village is the local community in which we live, or used to live. In primitive times, people didn’t move about so much, not from city to city or even country to country as migrants do these days. Back in the day when most people didn’t move from place to place, many did not move at all. When I was small, for example, I heard of country folks who had never visited the local town or city merely tens of kilometers away. In fact, a few of them very seldom left their village. The rare outside-the-village trip they ever made was to a neighboring village they can actually see on a roof, over there on the other side of the river. | 
