The Traveling Writer vs. Kids in Barcelona

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Persistence in Search of the American Dream

By Norma Jaeger Hopcraft

Dear fellow adventurers,

Please take a look at a fun (nearly manic) essay I wrote about perseverance, in which I admit to many things, including the idea that I may be more talented at perseverance than anything else in life : ) It's here, on ChangeThis.com, also known as CEO Reads.

Also, I’m quoted recently in The Washington Post travel section, in an article about rental car mistakes to be avoided (i.e., the one I made). Check it out here. 

Now, for some photos of Barcelona, a spectacularly beautiful city. Then this week’s story – see exactly how some other Spanish kids exhibited their disrespect to me.

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These pics are all from the Plaça Milicia del Desconegut. Styles from different periods of Barcelona's history stand shoulder to shoulder.

A mysterious doorway -- ooooo, what Catalan princess swooned here for her crazy Spanish suitor?

Catalan flags draped on balconies in the plaza.

Great hulking buildings -- what scenes of human travail has this one witnessed?

The Traveling Writer Resumes Her Theme

My friend May, a professor of economics and avid writer herself, replied to my last post that I was making a generalization about Spanish children. I agree with her that generalizations are dangerous to make, especially about people—not only dangerous for the people being stereotyped but also for the person making the stereotype. Generalizations / stereotypes cut us off from the richness and variety and truth of the situation.

But today I’ll tell you about some other kids in Barcelona that I taught and what happened. I’ll also quote two other adults who work with Spanish children. Then we’ll agree to not generalize about all Spanish kids.

While I lived with the 3 feral boys, some friends of their family stopped by. They seemed like nice folks, nice kids. They wanted me to teach their two girls English twice a week, on their lunch break from school. My employers said OK, so I said OK, very glad to have 30 euros in my pocket after every lesson.

Then the families stood around talking to each other in Catalan, and I just stood there, being polite and smiling and not understanding a word. Then one of the two girls I’d be teaching began doing something I’d never seen before, and it horrified me.

She lay down on the tile floor on her back, and lifted her feet up toward her father’s legs, and very slowly and incredibly gently lowered the soles of her feet onto his thighs. It wasn’t so much the action itself as her attitude. She exuded disrespect – she was doing this to lower her father. To me it was quite clear. We all read people’s attitudes every day. I think that I can read as well as the next person and that you would have gotten the same impression.

But I had agreed to teach, and I thought I might be able to handle two girls better than three boys that operated like a pack of wolves.

So I picked the girls up from school a few days later.

We walked toward their house, which was high on a hill and overlooked the blue Mediterranean Sea. To get there, we had to pass a fenced-in pasture where Calçot, a donkey, lived all alone. (His name means Green Onion in Catalan, by the way). There was tall grass along the fence, and some of it had turned brown in the intense autumn sun.

I walked ahead of the two girls, who kept a leisurely pace behind me. They weren’t in a big hurry to do more schoolwork, that’s for sure.

Well, the lesson went pretty well. The younger girl started to put her feet on me under the dining room table and I grabbed her ankle and said “No!” very firmly. She tried again another day, but on this particular day I didn’t feel her feet brushing my leg any more. The younger girl was very reluctant to participate in the games,  was slithery on the couch, made it clear she didn't much care. But with cajoling we got through the games in English that I had prepared. The older daughter seemed to have much more fun--and less of an issue with showing disrespect.

When the mother arrived home from work, I asked the girls to do the games again, to show their mom they had learned something. Then she paid me, and the 30 euros felt like bliss in my pocket. I scooted down the hill, past Calçot, and arrived on the terrace of the boys’ house with time left in the day to write.

As I wrote, I paused and touched my hair. I felt something prickly stuck there. It was bits of dried grass. How’d that get there, I wondered to myself. Then I felt another piece.

I jumped to my feet. There were bits of dead grass on the back of my head and the back of my clothes, from head to toe.

Those girls. They just had to show disrespect to an adult. It was their biggest preoccupation, evidently.

The Traveling Writer Persists in Search of the American Dream

I vowed to never walk ahead of them again.

But those 30 euros were wonderful. I would teach them again. And I would insist that those feet not rest any part of my body.

Now I’ll tell you about two other adults I talked to about the disrespect they experienced from Spanish children. One was my pastor at a church in a neighborhood of Barcelona called Gracia. The church was Eglise de Gracia, a play on the neighborhood name and the grace of God. The pastor’s name was David, and I asked him for advice to deal with the 3 boys I lived with and their disrespect.

“I used to coach my sons in football,” he said. Football is known as soccer in the U.S. Barcelona has a world-famous soccer team.  “I did it for two years, but the boys I coached were so disrespectful to me that I had to give it up.”

So there’s that. And there’s the quote I gave you in the last post, from a Barcelona native: “Los niños en España respetan nada.”

And then there’s the beautiful American woman I met at church, Stephanie, who translated David’s excellent sermons from Spanish to English for me. She was a teacher in an elementary school in Barcelona. She said the disrespect was constant, viral, feral, and hopeless. 

“I just do the best I can,” she admitted, “but it’s really awful, and awfully hard on me.”

That’s how I felt too. Next post, in two weeks: more stories of disrespect. Then maybe we’ll move on. How about you? Do you insist, like my friend May, that I ought not to make generalizations about Spanish children, or even just Barcelona children? We agreed at the top not to generalize, right? Okay, shall we stick to that? : ) Comment below!