Imagine yourself in a defeated position: either educated but not employed or not educated and unemployable. Catch 22.
Then finally you get employed but are made to become brain dead. The job becomes some hours to be endured. Welcome to the world of domestics. There’s too much talk around them nowadays. Either we learn to live without them or learn to live with them. And the first step is to understand that they come from very sordid backgrounds, unclean houses etc. So your fetish of cleanliness is a joke. It’s like us going into an Italian marble palace and looking for dirt, not even dust.
Second, we have to take a 365 degree look at anyone we are employing. What are the immediate problems? Can we help? Of course we can. In India even if we do not know someone we always manage to get to know them! Through connections, of course. So it’s always easier to get someone a job, especially if it’s not very high end.
I remember a doctor friend saying that some people’s idea of charity is to send people to her to get free treatment! Be that as it may, do offer free medicines at least. Never make the mistake of undertaking the treatment or the trip to the doctor; as it doesn’t work out. But we can surely pay for the medicines prescribed? The water injections that are invariably given by their doctors play an important psychiatric role.
For the life of us we cannot imagine how some domestics can exist on the meagre sum they earn and frankly neither can they. So they just borrow.
Try this. Add a small amount to their salary which you will hand over once a year or six months depending on your confidence to retain them and see the difference it can make. It can be just Rs 100 a month. More of course would be nice.
So we have now ticked off health, children’s education/jobs. What about the pride of being literate? One has heard of a teenager paying back his ayah/maid/cook what have you by teaching her to read and now she reads the papers and talks at length about matters that are important to her. And finally about their own old age: start a PPF fund and maybe enhance one’s skill. No it’s not about learning to drive; there are too many Uber drivers around anyway.
This writer’s old mother-in-law had a real relationship with her staff; they would greet each other every morning like long lost friends and catch up on what happened or did not happen during the time they were all apart. It was such a lovely relationship and not even for one day did her staff remain absent while she was alive.
Mainly because they knew their presence made a difference to her life.
(The writer John is founder, director, Coachlife. Email: santha.john@coachlife.asia; www.coachlife.asia)
