the great mamiweta debate

it has been a week of serious meetings and debates- namely between me and the preteen boy contingent at l'orphelinat. it all started when a group of kids came home with their report cards for the year (which rank every class by student, so kids here know EXACTLY where they stand) and 'les grands' (the older boys) started telling me how boys work harder than girls and are smarter than girls, etc etc. Of course this launched a massive debate/history-sociology class with me on one side of the table and 10-15 boys on the other, trying to engage in civil (read: extremely heated) discussion while testing the extreme limits of my french abilities. the boys all obviously get their ideas straight from what they see at the orphanage. it's not terribly uncommon to fail a year of school and repeat, but most kids at the orphelinat do work hard and do extremely well- a whole bunch of the kids are first, second, third in their classes of 50-60 some-odd students. and of 25 boys, only 2, both little kids, will repeat. but of 13 girls, 6 failed the past year, leaving (according to our calculations at the girl power meeting this morning) an appalling 40 percent difference in failure rate. and leaving me with not much concrete evidence for the intellectual equality of males and females.

this debate failure reallllly undermined my authority when the subject turned to .... mermaids. which basically EVERYONE here believes to exist. the local word is mamiweta, which actually derives from local languages, though it looks like it comes from mommy-water (see the french wikipedia on mermaids (sirenes) for details). i have actually spent hours in the past week debating the existence of mamiweta. the trouble is, everyone here has an uncle or a grandma who saw one for his or herself, and all the beninese adults defend (i might add, with a bit of condescension) the kids' claims. we finally went to the internet cafe to do some research and i think i convinced one of the kids, but the rest are thoroughly resolved to keep on believin'.

during the course of the debate, i accidentally pulled a grinch and destroyed santa claus (papa noel in french) by making a comparison to 'another mythical creature that children believe in but adults know to be imaginary', but luckily, since nobody believes me about the mermaids, i don't think i've succeeded in destroying christmas either.