#188 Multilingual Kids
Submitted by Valérie
OMG she is just the smartest child ever!
When facing a difficult meeting with a hostile EAW (the guy from the international organization that is about to duplicate your project, or the one competing for the co-financing that would earn you this year’s bonus…) or a key meeting with a strategically important EAW (someone who might be your next boss, or the one that might award you the co- financing that would earn you this year’s bonus…), it’s always a good idea to know if the person has children.
Once you know that, you have found your in. Maneuver the conversation around to the topic of multilingual kids and you are about to score more brownie points than you ever could with the most brilliant power point presentation of impacts and success stories.
Long-standing EAWs typically have around 3 kids born in at least 2 different countries, and these kids are geniuses. You will hear about how the older one, who was born in Laos but spent his 5 first years in Tanzania and attends French school usually prefers to speak Dutch with her grandma. You’ll be in awe at the youngest one, who speaks American English with his parents but British English at school and is working on a hilarious comic book about the differences between the two. And you’ll be amazed to learn that the three kids have developed their own Creole of Lingala and Quechua as their common secret language.
If you’re lucky, the EAW will have some pop statistics about how children who speak multiple languages are more intelligent and socially adept than those who only speak one language, and how speaking more than one language makes children have better problem solving abilities and more developed activity in the regions of the brain that deal with empathy. This helps the EAW feel OK about moving the children around every few years, having a variety of local women do the majority of the child rearing and putting aid work first.
Keep the monologue going through simple questions and well-placed exclamations of “wow” and “oh my god, that’s impressive”. You are almost there – that EAW is going to love you.
Stuff Expat Aid Workers Like 
“This helps the EAW feel OK about moving the children around every few years, having a variety of local women do the majority of the child rearing and putting aid work first.”
Of course the EAW gets away with the kind of parenting that would normally get an anonymous phone call to social services. I’ve never seen such an emotionally unstable, flea bitten, malnourished, miserable, poorly educated and non-verbal bunch of children as the prodigy of the EAW. EAWs are mostly terrible parents: especially if their partner is also an EAW, in which case you get a double-whammy of poor parenting. Their kids typically get dumped with a nanny/housekeeper duo – most of whom are a far cry from Mary Poppins – of whom the EAW will ask no questions so long as the children survive and the domestic staff work the kind of hours no self-respecting babyboomer grandparent would ever do. Even among the better cared-for, the kids hardly learn to speak and their food hygiene is so poor they get parasites. In the worse cases, kids get knocked off their perch when the EAW parent adopts a local child who is ever-so-much more deserving of their time and attention than their biological chidlren. Meanwhile, the staff do an absolute minimum of work because they know all the EAW really cares about, let’s be honest, is avoiding childcare and going out to get shit-faced as much as possible. Many kids have an emptiness in their eyes that makes average street kids look the picture of an ideal childhood. If, to resolve this situation, the EAW has a spouse that chooses to raise their children themselves and refuses to sacrifice their kids to the cause, trouble looms. The EAW community will exclude any who stoically refuse to be pimped to the “business” through some spouse hobby job with a sister aid agency – though, of course, giving a hobby job to the spouse of donor agency employee is celebrated as perfectly acceptable.
Incidentally, on the question of why EAW so often have three children whilst the rest of the middle-class suburban world typically has two: hormonal contraception often fails if you’re constantly on the toilet with the shits or taking antibiotics to treat various tropical diseases.