Domestic help

As well s being the most family friendly country I have ever been in, I would also say that Saudi Arabia is a country of luxury....at least for the privileged classes. Good service is standard and domestic help is more than common--it is the norm. That said, the discussion in our home about employing, for lack of a better word, a servant, has been ongoing. For the cost of 10 hours of cleaning in Sweden, we could hire a full-time housekeeper here in Riyadh. For us, this means less time doing chores, more time having fun with the kids.

However, employing a housekeeper (at least in our home) seems to be a much bigger question than that of cost. Does, for example, employing a full-time housekeeper mean that we are supporting an oppressive unjust system? Or, does it mean that we are giving a person in need of work a job with a much needed salary? Are we being fair by offering the going rate or are we exploiting the less fortunate? What is fair and just in a society that is not really a society as we know it but rather a conglomeration of families and tribes held together only by their religion on a mass of dessert land that is home to the birthplace of Abraham...father of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam? Bo Rothstein (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Just-Institutions-Matter-Political-Institutional/dp/0521598931/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1279258331&sr=8-1), where are you when I need you?

Another aspect that has been on our minds is how to manage the family dynamic with the addition of a housekeeper. How do we as parents show our children that all human beings deserve the same level of respect regardless of their work, salary, social class, religion, culture, language, etc, etc, etc? What type of relationship do we want our housekeeper to have with our children and our children to have with our housekeeper? How do we teach our children to pick-up and clean-up after themselves if we have somebody here doing it for them? A housekeeper adds a variable to our family equation that will mean for us as parents an additional amount of thoughtfulness and consideration. And what has been obvious for us is that the maids (that are really jack-of-all-trades: maids, nannies, cooks) really want to spend time with the children because a good majority have left their families back home to come to KSA to earn money to send home. We are just not the type of people that want others raising our kids.....sorry.

Somewhere between 30 and 50% of the Saudi population are foreign workers here on temporary visas. The Europeans, American's and Austrailianers taking the high-skilled jobs for which Saudi's are unqualified and the Asians and Africans taking the service jobs which are considered "beneath" the Saudi's. Go into any store or restaurant, for example and you will not see a Saudi national working but somebody from Pakistan or the Philippines or other Asian nation.

When we started talking about employing a maid, we were really on the fence about it. In Sweden we had a cleaning service come into our home about 10-15 hrs per month. So, we knew that we wanted something, but full time seemed a little over the top. We don't need a full time housekeeper.

We first met a lovely woman from Nigeria who we instantly liked. She had been referred to us by another family that we know. She was nice to the kids and very outgoing. As she said to us, "I really need the money!" She had a son and had to pay for his schooling so having a regular salary was really important to her. But, at the end of the day she lived to far away to make the trip to us every day. As women can't drive she would have had to take a taxi to and from our house every day and that journey would have eaten up a good chunk of her salary.

Next came a woman from Senegal who was referred to us by our driver. I loved listening to her talk with that French accent!! But, she was only looking for work during the summer, until "her family" (that is, the family that she regularly worked for) returned from vacation. She, however, had a sister. At this we decided to call the woman from Nigeria back and offer to pay for part of her travel expense so she could help us until we or she found something else. But then something happened. The phone started ringing off the hook and people started knocking on our door:

"You looking for maid, madam?"

Inside of the compound are two parallel universes. One of expat families, and one of employees--maids, gardeners, maintenance, wait staff, etc, etc and news had travelled fast that a new family had moved in.

We decided to test out the first woman that came knocking. A woman from Sri Lanka with an 11 year old back home. She wanted full time work and to "live-in". We have a maid's room (that does sound better than servants' quarters, doesn't it?????). We were really apprehensive about letting her live-in. For the most part because the standard of the maid's room is so much below the standard of the rest of the house. Our maid's room is, however, much larger than the other rooms I have seen for housekeepers, and it has its own private bathroom with its own entrance. So, comparatively, our maid's room is definitely nicer than the others we have seen. And, at the end of the day, she has no place to live right now as the family she had been working for 5 years, moved back to Pakistan last week. She moves in tomorrow, we'll see how it goes.

So, in three weeks we've gone from not wanting a full-time housekeeper to having a housekeeper live with us. Have we changed or have the circumstances???