The subject is the discipline of children, and the principles somewhat scary. I mainly understand what is going on, and when the woman who is speaking brings out a stick her meaning is clear. However, with my beginner’s Spanish, it is hard to make my feelings on the matter quite so plain.
I ask Mariet, who is next to me, whether the stick is for hitting children. However, I use a word for ‘to hit’, which Paul says basically means “beat the living daylights out of”. Mariet replies that no, the stick is just for beating them slightly. She has a stick that she calls the “stick of love” which she uses to discipline Itamar. I explain haltingly that in England it is not our custom to “beat the living daylights out of our children”. Once again this has me down as a negligent parent!
One of the women at the meeting takes centre stage explaining how we shouldn’t force our menfolk to work in the house, because we are created “equal but different”, Again, I don’t have the Spanish to make my feelings on this plain. Probably just as well.
Then we have biblically based games and a recipe demonstration – some cake involving dunking biscuits in a mixture of cream and raw egg. I eat it with caution, feeling like I have joined the WI. I win a lollipop for repeating the memory verse (in English, and since none of them speak it I might just as well have said ‘marmelade, Earl Grey tea, the Queen’. I can see that some of the very competitive Damas think this very unjust).
Daisy stays at home with Paul and Enrique, who is looking after baby Pablo… for the first time in his five month life, it emerges. Mariet says that men in Mexico are different. I try not to snort.
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