All these issues are fairly obvious once you start thinking. What is really worrying, however, is something I didn’t properly realise until a few weeks ago. I had asked her to clean the fridge. She took out the shelves in the door, cleaned them and put them back. In the top shelf, there are trays for eggs that sit neatly inside the shelf. When she put the shelf back, the egg trays had to go in diagonally because they would not fit. I am pretty convinced that she was not being lazy, she just doesn’t have the reasoning to think that perhaps another shelf that looks the same might actually be a slightly different size and might fit. If I showed her, she would remember, she is not stupid, the problem is that she has never been taught how to think.

The simple exercises we did in our first years at junior school, or even before, with building blocks as a toddler, have an impact that is so basic for us, we don’t even notice.

I have been asked to decide if her daughter’s various suitors so far are good men for her daughter to marry. One of them was a man who sells fruit from a donkey cart, smokes a lot of weed and could give her a lot of gold and a fair sized apartment as a dowry. This man does the same job as her son, who does not smoke, comes from the same background and could never afford any of that. It hadn’t crossed her mind that perhaps he does more than just smoke the drugs.

If this inability to think things out through lack of education is applied to a very conservative 25% of the population, it has rather worrying implications. If it is further applied to discussions about the main topics here, politics and religion, well, need I say more?

Although the fridge and the suitor incidents may seem like stupidity, they aren’t. This woman is not an idiot, by any stretch of the imagination. It’s purely lack of education in its widest sense.

What provoked this thought was that I asked her on Wednesday if she would like to learn to iron. Her face beamed.

“Oh! Yes, I would! Step by step. You know? I’m old, I will be 45 next month, but my brain is still young and I want to learn new things.”

I wanted to cry.