Mimosas, Manicures, and Maids

When most people think about expat life, they picture wealthy women dripping with jewelry sitting around sipping exotic drinks and nibbling on sweets while getting pedicures for $3.00 and all the while their homes are being cleaned and cared for by a team of maids, nannies, and gardeners. I’ve heard that you know you’ve adapted to expat life when you no longer feel bad about paying someone $20/day to clean or have accepted a live-in maid. Man, wouldn’t that be nice!

I have to admit that my own expectations were a little higher than reality. For starters, moving to a “developing country” one expects that everything will be inexpensive compared to one’s home country. With everything being inexpensive, getting help in the house seems logical and could free up some time for other activities that one couldn’t necessarily afford to do as frequently in one’s home country. However, to not complicate the topic, I will concentrate on maids for now. Price shock is another tale.

In Latin America, having a maid is supposedly one of the perks of life. It’s one of the selling points to expat spouses – you’ll have someone to take care of your home so you can get out and do other things.

I was excited about this possibility when we first arrived. Wow! How nice to have someone come in several times a week to do all the undesirable chores – cleaning the bathrooms, mopping the floors, washing dishes (no automatic dishwasher here). We tried it for a while, but I found that having a maid actually consumed more time than it freed up for me.

One Latin American couple told me that maids are a “necessary evil”. You can’t live without them because, after all, how are you supposed to clean and cook for yourselves? This is the mentality, or maybe even the engrained belief, of many from this region of the world. That’s one of the differences with the way I and many others in the U.S. were raised. We learned to make our beds, collect and take out the trash, wash dishes and laundry, set the table, dust, vacuum, iron, mow the lawn, and basically, clean up after ourselves. This was a normal part of life. Our parents were preparing us how to live independently.

For me, this independence continues to be important. From the time we got our maid, I tried to get involved in various activities – either teaching or taking classes. However, I had to schedule everything around her coming and going. The definition of time is so different here, that you can’t expect someone to be “on time”, not even the maid. Waiting for the maid to arrive when I could have been heading to the gym, or waiting until the maid left so I could lock up and go to the grocery store bothered me. Trying to teach or take a class in the apartment felt too disruptive. (A little aside but something necessary to understand is that until you know you can trust your maid, you need to be present, so you can make sure things are being done correctly, nothing is missing, and you can lock up. Hate that feeling of not being able to trust.)

And, then there’s the idea of a full-time maid so that one doesn’t have these problems. I can see the advantages of a full-time maid – she would sleep here, could stay with the dog while we are on vacation, but it would be one more mouth to feed. She would be, in essence, a child to take care of. And, there’s the issue of privacy. How weird to have someone in your home, who is neither family nor someone you can treat as a friend, but an employee at all times. How uncomfortable to relegate another person to the room off the kitchen and attached to the laundry room. Sorry, no window with direct sunlight. And, please, don’t come out of your room after 8 p.m., so we can have our privacy. Just feels odd.

Anyway, long story short, I let our maid go – found her a new place to work because I really liked her and she did do a good job – but I did it because I needed to free up my time, to be able to come and go as I pleased in my own home.