We enjoy our maid but she's pretty funny. She sure knows how to take care of a house. She tells us where to put things and shows us new ways to use things. We can't find things after she's at our house, but most of the time, she's come up with a great new place to store things. It's pretty amazing. This woman was very aggressive in receiving a job with us..she called us three times in 5 days and then wanted to have the keys right away to our building.
But actually I admire her perserverance. Especially after I heard a little bit of her story.
She is from Sri Lanka and she lives here with her husband. Their two children, ages 13 and 15 are living there with her mother. She hasn't seen them in two years (and I thought 4 months for seperation from Ben was bad!) Everything they owned was lost in the awful earthquake/flood a couple years ago--remember THE sunami? Her and her husband now have jobs in Kuwait to try and make money for their children's school and to live on. Reminds me a little of some of the Somalias I knew in Pelican Rapids. (sending money home)
It's a bit odd to say "yes my maid will take care of that". We had a housekeeper in PR-a Bosnian woman who was also working very hard to help her family. But somehow this is different. Our apartment manager (official name Harres) works SO HARD to make money to send his wife and little child to Kuwait. He is waiting for this to happen-maybe this year.
As I said earlier, this country is full of HAVEs and HAVENOTs. And we're somewhere in the middle. Thankful for what we have, thankful for what we don't have and appreciative of what we can have.
Below is an article about Sri Lankan maids from the NY Times. After reading it, I can see why Mali was so forward in getting a job with teachers. It could be alot worse.
NYTIMES....After a year of thinking, 35-year-old Lalitha - who prefers that name - decided to trade her life as a Sri Lankan housewife for one as a Middle Eastern housemaid. After completing their 12-day training, she and her classmates would join a mass migration of women to the Persian Gulf's petro-lubricated economies, trading the fecundity and community of Sri Lankan villages for the aridity and high-walled homes of the Arab world.
Behind those walls the women risk exploitation so extreme that it sometimes approaches "slaverylike" conditions, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report on foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. But while attention has focused on the failure of countries like Saudi Arabia to prevent or prosecute abuses, the de facto complicity of the countries that send their women abroad has largely escaped scrutiny.
For developing countries, migration has become a safety valve, easing the pressure to employ the poor and generating more than $100 billion in remittances in 2003, according to a study by Devesh Kapur, an associate professor of government at Harvard.
More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly 1 in every 19 citizens - now work abroad, and nearly 600,000 are housemaids, according to government estimates. Migrant workers have become Sri Lanka's largest and most consistent earner of foreign exchange, out-doing all major agricultural crops.
Sri Lanka's government has become an assiduous marketer of its own people. With training programs like Lalitha's, it is helping to prepare what is by now a second generation of housemaids. It even provides a safe haven to shelter, hide and rehabilitate those women who return with broken bodies, lost minds or incipient children.
The women often leave indebted, work virtually indentured and have almost no legal redress against the sexual harassment, confinement or physical abuse they often suffer in the countries they adopt. With no absentee voting rights, they also have no political voice back home.
By one estimate, 15 to 20 percent of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit people trafficking schemes or prostitution.
Many housemaids who run away from their employers are kept in limbo at Sri Lanka's embassies because no one wants to pay their way home. Last year, after their plight was publicized, the government airlifted home 529 maids who had been living for months, packed as tightly as in a slavehold, in the basement of the embassy in Kuwait.
NOTE: THE CHURCH I now attend helped these women.
1 comment:
All right, NWB... I finally found time to catch up on ALL your posts... and, good god, did you have a bunch!
Here is a slew of comments on various things:
On "The Long Minnesota Goodbye Part II" and "Tough Stock": I totally understand what you mean about trying to fit EVERYONE in before leaving. Even though your brain knows you're not going to be gone that long, your heart tells you that anything could happen, that you and they could be very, very different when you return, that things may never ever be the same again... und so weiter. I did the same thing before leaving for Germany, tooling all over the country, trying to see everyone twice. I was absolutely heartbroken when one very close friend waited in the Cities for over 4 hours for me to return from PR... only to leave 10 minutes before I arrived at his house... a mere day before I left the country.
While, yes, you cannot control what happens while you are away, you also would not be able to control that in PR, either. You are not much farther away than circumstances in PR would make you.
Additionally, you CAN control communication. When you feel like talking to someone but it is the middle of the night in America, or you have no Internet access, or whatever excuse your brain can come up with... WRITE A LETTER. Really. They mean the most. Then, actually SEND it. No matter how long it is lost in your junk drawer or how much you rethink what you wrote in the morning... SEND IT. Those sentiments were and are true, and the recipient will be grateful for your thoughts and your trust.
On "Inquiring Minds Want to Know": I definitely recommend the book "Lipstick Jihad," by Azadeh Moaveni (if you have not already read it :) ). Even for me in Germany, this book is providing some remarkable insights on being thrust into a whole new world, and, being set in the Middle East, perhaps will be even more enlightening to you. The book centers around Azadeh's younger life as an Iranian who grew up in America, then chose to return to Iran as a journalist in the early 2000s, covering the revolutionary forces. I think both you and Anna would enjoy it.
On "SWOT Running": Man, do I ever hear you on the fears of losing your social group! I am currently floundering hard, trying to find things to do and ways to stay motivated during a vacation that never seems to end in a small town in which I know only 4 other people!
And yet, throughout the freak outs and the tweaking and the total cabin fever... I've slowly come to realize how to stay busy, how to entertain myself, the things that I truly care about, and the people who really, truly mean something to me... and, perhaps most importantly, I feel that I am learning how to simply LIVE with myself.
And, finally, unrelated notes:
- The throwing away of theatre things hurts me, as well.
- No matter what code names you come up with, someone(s) is always going to know who you are talking about.
- Though your weather is hot, at least you have sun in more than 10 minute increments.
- My Skype name is the same as my Yahoo e-mail username, and they now have unlimited calls to the U.S. and Canada for only $3.95 or so per month. DEF check it out. It's saving my life.
Glad to hear all is going well! Keep blogging and keep in touch!
- ADOOTCHER
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