Yes, yes, I know it has been a (too) long time since I last wrote and, to be honest, I didn't know it had been so long until I realized the other day that I have now been in Haiti for almost five months and I have written only 1.5 posts (the turtle doesn't count, gut busting though he may be). I invite you all to imagine the best possible apology I could make and pretend I said that to you. And allow me to further make up for it by saying 1) I have been *thinking* about the blog, even in my neglect, and I have a huge list of things I have seen or thought since coming here that I meant to post; 2) although said list of things will probably be less amusing now that many of them are long done and I don't remember all of the details, I AM committed to posting all of these little tidbits in the coming week or two b/c 3) it is my New Year's resolution to keep up better w/my blog, and I'm planning to get a head start this week!
To be frank, I am not feeling particularly inspired at the moment, but I do feel capable of telling you a bit about the maid, whom I believe I mentioned in connection w/my scrubbing the kitchen til it hurt story. All I can say is, she is a lovely person. Truly, a lovely human being. But the woman can't clean, which seems a bit contradictory since her life's work is apparently cleaning. For the purposes of this blog, we will call the maid Lucy. Lucy was recommended to me by some friends, all of whom are related somehow and all of whom have used Lucy for some time now and seem perfectly satisfied with her, although I was warned that Lucy is not the brightest of ladies. Somehow, these friends did not foresee that Lucy would become the bain of my Haitian existence.
She comes every Thursday, sometimes inappropriately early, lets herself in with a gigantic smile that I find endearing despite myself, and then insists that no matter what I am doing, I kiss her, hug her, and talk to her (in Creole, of course) about what's been happening in the life of Lucy since last Thursday. Once, I was in the middle of getting dressed when she arrived and she just walked right in to the bedroom, went through her usual protocol, me all the while covering my bare breasts with my arms and trying to finish putting on my pants. This is somewhat remarkable considering that Lucy, who is supposed to wash my clothes as well as clean house, refuses to wash my underwear, bras, or even bathing suits, ostensibly b/c it would be embarrassing for me to have her see these private bits of clothing. I'm not sure how her seeing the clothing can be more embarrassing than her seeing my actual private bits, but somehow in her mind, that all makes sense. (Incidentally, Lucy *does* wash guy underwear, which in my opinion can be far more disgusting than ladies', but whatever. Also, Lucy does a horrible job washing clothes and ruined at least three articles of clothing before I stopped giving her anything besides jeans and pajamas. Yes, this means that I spend about five hours a week washing my clothes in my bathroom sink, marveling the whole time that Lucy is getting paid for the job I am doing.)
Usually, Lucy likes to start her day at my house by doing the dishes. However, after discovering that the dishes were almost never actually clean after she got ahold of them, I started trying to do any dishes the night before, leaving her maybe a bowl or pan so that she still feels like she's doing something. Which reminds me of another fun exchange I once had w/Lucy, shortly after I realized that her dish-washing was more like dish-rinsing: Lucy arrived bright and early and headed straight to the kitchen, where I intercepted her and delivered the Creole phrase I had practiced to be sure that she would understand what I was saying -- 'M'ap fe vaysel yo, mwen vle fe yo, mwen pa vle ou fe sa,' or, 'I going to do the dishes, I want to do them, I don't want you to do them.' Perhaps not delicately phrased, but clear. Lucy laughed at me and said, 'Se travay mwen, m'fe vaysel yo.' ('It's my job, I do the dishes.') The only other thing I could have said to her was, 'You do a bad job, get the f**k out of my kitchen' but I just couldn't bring myself to burst her little bubble like that, so I sighed and left the kitchen and spent an hour re-washing the dishes after she had left.
So now that Lucy no longer has much to do with the dishes, she quickly moves on to 'dusting.' As near as I can tell, this involves her moving every item in my living room, wiping whatever they are sitting on in a wholly ineffective manner (I wiped floor-to-ceiling cobwebs out of every corner of my living room just the other day), and then replacing everything in a way that in no way resembles the original order. Sometimes this is b/c she just doesn't pay attention or somehow doesn't realize that everything has an actual place, but I have noticed that there a few things she *always* puts back in the same (wrong) way, and I think this is b/c she likes to arrange things in my house as *she* thinks they should be, rather than as they actually should be. For example, my landlord left a number of very pretty ornamental china pieces, which I have displayed in the living room on a wide shelf. Knowing that my cats also love said shelf, I moved the china pieces back far enough so that even if my awesomely bad cats knock something over, it won't fall off the shelf, BUT the pieces are still visible to people who might have a particular interest in blue china (whoever they may be). EVERY week, Lucy not only moves these pieces forward toward the edge of the shelf, she also rearranges them in a way that makes no sense if she is concerned that people are not able to see the pieces. And EVERY week, I go behind Lucy and fix this and whatever other nonsense she has perpetrated.
Cleaning the bathrooms follows next, which consists of cleaning the toilet (hard to mess that one up, thank God), sink, and shower. The shower she has apparently decided to take a pass on. I believe she is somewhat afraid of the shower in my room -- a brand-new, stand-up, glass-walled thing that looks a bit like a space pod -- and I am partly relieved, as I have a feeling she would find a way to break it. Why she does nothing w/the guest shower, I am at a loss to explain. It's just a regular tile shower, easy to get in, around, and out of, no real reason to neglect that one. But she does. Cleaning the sink seems to entail using too much water, not enough soap, and then putting back the countertop items (in incorrect order, of course) and allowing them to sit in the puddle of water that remains. I'm sure you, my brainy readers, can guess what happens next, but in case you need it stated for you, I spend on average one hour per week cleaning the bathroom that has supposedly been cleaned already, and I regularly try to explain to Lucy that there is an order to the way the towels, sheets, etc. are arranged, that she can't just throw them on the shelves wherever she sees space.
Lucy does make a bed very nicely.
Because Lucy would like to be employed more often at my house, but in the capacity of cook, not maid, she sometimes takes a break from her 'work' to make me lunch. Since vegetarians are scarce in Haiti, she is often a bit puzzled about what to make, a dilemma usually resolved with rice and beans or pasta. A couple of weeks ago, Lucy went into the kitchen to make lunch and came to me w/a can of pate that was leftover from a party I had hosted, asking me 'ki kalite vyann?' I told her it was pork, she went back to the kitchen, and I assumed she was making lunch for herself. Twenty minutes later, Lucy emerges w/a plate of rice and beans (unseasoned b/c she only knows salt and pepper and can't figure out how to work the grinders I brought back from the US, although I have shown her), that she proudly sets before me, accompanied by.....the pate! The pate actually looked pretty good, as those things go; I think she had sauteed it in some hot sauce, but of course, I was not going to eat it. I told her thank you very much, but pointed out that she had served me meat and asked if she would like to have it. Her eyebrows shot up and then together, and she confusedly said, 'Non, se pa vyann, se Spam,' -- 'It's not meat, it's Spam.' I laughed and tried to gently explain that Spam is (technically) meat and I therefore do not eat it, but I actually wanted to ask her if she was completely retarded, as we had *just* established very clearly that the can she showed me contained *pork*, a *meat* product. I didn't bother trying to explain to her further that not all canned meat is Spam, as that really would have been masochistic on my part.
The number of incidents I could write about relating to Lucy are almost innumerable, but I think you get the idea by now. She sucks at her job, and Thursdays have come to be a day I dread if I know I will be at home when she comes, but I can't fire her b/c a) it would be offensive to the friends who recommended her to me, as if I was saying that she's good enough for them but not for me, and b) she really is sweet, not to mention poor, and w/two children that she is trying to send to school (which is not free here). So instead, this woman is getting paid to drive me crazy on a weekly basis, and I vascillate between wanting to throttle her and appreciating that she is an honest woman trying to make a living in a really hard country.
The thing that really puzzles me is that Lucy does work quite hard while she's here. I mean, I see her doing the work and she's doing quite a job, it's just not actually achieving the intended goal. Sometimes this makes me wonder what is going through her head. Does she like her job? She seems to take pride in it and put real effort into it, but are there ever times, maybe when she is going home at the end of the day, tired from a long day of mopping floors and washing clothes in the sun, where she thinks, 'Is this all my life is to be?' Often people here in Haiti seem so happy just to have a paying job, no matter what that job is, that it doesn't occur to those around them to question whether or not these people are actually happy themselves or fulfilled, but maybe when you're this poor, you don't concern yourself w/things like that. I also try to regularly remind myself that Lucy has never been to school, she was never even formally trained as a maid, so it's almost to be expected that she has no real idea of what she's doing. But almost the whole country is like this. Because only 15% of Haitians ever go to school (and that is not saying that they all graduate), what you have is a population that for generations has had no formal training or education, no fostering of intellectual abilities or constructive problem solving. That is not to say that they are stupid, b/c they certainly are not (well, I think Lucy may be, but she's exceptional) and you do see quite a bit of resourcefulness here, but you see people resourcefully solving problems only in the short-term, never thinking about how they can fix things in the long-term or even how they can prevent the problems from occurring at all. They're just not taught to do that, and many of them don't know if they will be around for the long-term anyhow, so what concern is it of theirs?
A friend of mine has coined a phrase for what you see in Haiti -- Deprivation Syndrome. The persistent, deep deprivation that is normal life for most people here has created some interesting, not very nice behavioral responses in those people that you can see in a variety of situations. Take driving here for example. In Port-au-Prince, driving is a nightmare not only b/c of the usual big-city issues, but also b/c people are only out for themselves once they are behind the wheel. Since you know traffic is not going to stop to let you back out of an on-street parking spot, it is normal to just start backing out and slowly wedge yourself further and further until traffic has no choice but to let you out. Of course, what would make more sense is if the oncoming traffic would just stop for 30 seconds and let the person out. But they don't. I have even seen cars nearly cause accidents as they try to swerve around a car entering traffic, rather than just stop and let that person out. It's not that they're bad or mean people generally, it's just that they are so used to struggling for everything, that it does not occur to them to allow someone else to have something, even if it is just an easier entrance into traffic. The inability to think too far into the future or to use critical reasoning are also symptoms of the Syndrome. As an example of the latter (besides the ones I provided by Lucy), I was driving home the other day and came to an intersection that has a gas station on one corner. It seems that this gas station is where the Port-au-Prince police vehicles fill up (since, ya know, they don't have their own gas station like a real police force) and a large number of them were going to the station at one time. Unfortunately, they did not have the ability to a) predict that such a large number of slow- or un-moving vehicles in this intersection would cause a traffic backup; or b) to then respond appropriately to the situation by having one of their officers get out and help direct traffic, and so instead what I witnessed was two cop trucks sitting in the intersection waiting for the trucks ahead of them to finish filling up, making it impossible for my lane of traffic to move until they did so, AND two other trucks who had attempted to turn around in the middle of the street in order to try to get in the fuel line, and were thereby blocking two other lanes of traffic. And these are the police, the city's first responders in times of crisis! I'm not sure that I ever had much confidence in them before, but what little I had went out the window after that debacle.
So sometimes I look at Lucy's latest incident of faulty reasoning (or outright idiocy) and I try to convince myself that there is a way to overcome the Deprivation Syndrome. Dear God, please let there be a way.
