Sunday, November 30, 2008

Maid in Heaven?

Okay, the title is a bit misleading. Things have gotten a lot better with our maid, although crediting the celestial beings for creating a perfect match is a bit of an overstatement.

A few weeks ago, we were looking to get rid of our current maid Booah. She is willing to work very hard, but would sometimes do things to just annoy the hell out of me.

One thing that raised my blood pressure is that sometimes Tim and I would ask her to do something very specific and she would just ignore what we said. This wasn't a matter of not understanding us, this was her deciding that she wasn't going to do what we asked. A good example was one morning when I had Tim tell Booah not to clean Nalin's and Aleena's rooms that day. I wanted the girls to pick up after themselves. Its easy when they have a maid to just leave a mess behind. That afternoon before the kids returned from school, I saw that Aleena's room was clean and tidy. I asked Booah about it. She told me that there was some powder on the floor that she had to mop, so she cleaned the entire room. Those things happened to Tim and I with some frequency.

The other hair pulling personality trait involved communication. She doesn't listen very well. I'll start to ask her to do something, and before I'm half-way done she interrupts and explains that it can't be done. Unfortunately, if she had taken another twenty seconds to listen to me, she would have realized that I was not asking for what she said could not be done, but something else. Even when I did get the entire request out, she would sometimes say that she understood, when in fact she really didn't.

Despite some of our frustrations, Tim and I decided to keep trying to make it work with Booah. Booah really does work hard, and she can speak some English. She is actually a decent cook, cleans pretty well, and the girls are starting to like her. Tim and I also thought that perhaps the fact that she had just started a month before, and that we almost immediately moved might have made it more stressful for Booah. The problems were not all Booah's doings. I would be frustrated by things she did, so when she came to me to tell me that something was broken, or that she needed something, I didn't exert a lot of effort to hide my annoyance. I'm sure that she picked up on it, and didn't make the working relationship any better.

Over the last two or so weeks, things have gotten a lot better. I've made an effort to try to reduce her work load a bit with the kids at bedtime so that Booah can end her day a bit earlier. I've also made it a point to keep a positive attitude. When she interrupts me mid-instruction, I don't get frustrated, I just calmly ask her to listen (I tug on my ear as I do it) and explain what I want. The attitude change has really helped me. Whether she is really doing a better job or I'm just looking at things a bit differently, I'm not sure, but in either case I'm a lot happier with her performance.

Last night I was talking to Booah a bit about her family. I may have already mentioned that she is from Myanmar (formerly Burma). She is thirty years old, married but without children. Her husband works in Bangkok, but since Booah lives here in our house, they only see each other one day a week. She has a younger sister (twenty-seven) and brother (sixteen). Booah sends some of her money to her mother (her father has passed) to help pay for her brother's education. She's been in Thailand for ten years, and plans on staying another ten. I actually hope that she spends a few of those ten with us.

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