Beautiful Butterfly

Anyone who has employed a maid before would know the kind of worries and anxiety I am having with employing a foreign maid. My current maid permit is going to expire this september and I have to find another replacement soon. Though she has worked for me for almost two years, I do not know a single thing about her family. You must have thought why I never bother to ask her about it but how could someone who works so far from her family and seeing us everyday would not strike a conversation about her family? I find her terribly secretive. Maybe she doesn’t have a family but someone who doesn’t talk much could make you wonder whether she has any criminal records that she wouldn’t reveal or maybe she is mentally ill.

I know I might be going overboard about this but I was going through Shazmin’s (mix fm breakfast show deejay) blog and she is also freaking out about her new arrival of maid. I can understand how she is feeling about not leaving her toddler of 1+year alone with her maid Joy and she is worried how the maid is going to take care of her baby when it’s due this late June. So her situation is pretty much like mine. When my new maid arrives in September, she has only two months before I’ll give birth in November. I’m luckier than Shazmin in the sense that I do not need to leave my kids alone with my maid because I have my mom to look after them. Even when my firstborn was barely six months, I have instructed my mom to bring my baby out together with her when she leaves the house so even now my baby has the habit of crying if he sees anyone leaves the house without him. However, I do leave my toddler with my maid once in a while now that he’s much bigger as she seems to adore him very much.

It’s not that I’m worried that my maid will abduct my kid (though I do worries sometimes) but she really doesn’t know how to take care of children. When my baby was 5months, she left the back door open while collecting the clothes and my son fell two steps down hitting his head while on his walker despite us reminding her never to leave the door open. Even once we suspected her of accidently caused my baby to have a bruise on his head but she never told us anything about it. She is very adsent-minded in whatever she does as if her mind is not with her all the times. She also leaves the tap water running forgetting to turn it off when she does her chores, leaving the stove when we asked her to watch over the food we’re cooking and etc.

Why I never change another maid then? employing maid is like hitting a jackpot. You’ll never know what you are going to get. What if you get a worse maid after paying additional money for the change of maid? I learnt to not set a high expectations on these foreign maids. Eventhough my my maid sweeps the floors twice a day and it’s still never clean, having her does simple chores is better than not having a helper at all. Afterall, they aren’t paid much and they come from far and poor background where my mom’s previous maid said,"they don’t even need to sweep the floor because they lives in very bad condition where sweeping the floor doesn’t make any difference."

However, our all-too-nice government just signed a memorandum recently with Indonesia to protect the maids. It’s not enough that the maids salary kept increasing, now we can’t even deduct their few months salaries. Halloo….? They need to pay the agents fees to bring them over and they do not even have a single cent and we employer not only also have to pay the agents for bringing the maid but we have to pay for the maid for their agents fees. So it’s the agents who gets all. Who is protecting the employers then? Seriously I don’t mind paying more for the maid but please give us what we deserve for the money worth- a better maid - guaranteed!

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 18th, 2006 at 1:50 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.