We’re currently staying in an orphanage in rural Mozambique, on the outskirts of a fairly large city. Life here is rural – we have cows and goats and chickens and sheep, and grow a range of fruits and vegetables. Now, recently our chickens have suffered an horrific and debilitating plague, causing almost all of them to die, all within the space of about a week. You could call it an epidemic. You could say the population has been decimated. You could say this, and whilst technically true, you'd have to say it 33 times to paint the full picture... I've been doing some maths. To decimate means to 'reduce by one tenth'. We started off with about 100 chickens, and now we have 3. To say that our chicken population was decimated would mean that we
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