A Tale of Two Maids

At the risk of sounding richer than I really am-- I have two maids.

A "real" one  in France, and one here in L.A. for my rented house.

Nadia, the one in France, is someone I have known for many years. I hired her soon after my youngest child was born, and she has worked for me ever since.

She was working for a Kuwaiti employer who treated her like a slave, confiscated her wages, kept her passport and made her work seven days a week. When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, her Kuwaiti employers took their jewelry and servants and fled to  a hotel in the French Riviera. Nadia discovered that servants in France were not treated like that. She sneaked out of the hotel at night and escaped on her own to Paris, where her embassy helped her. I met her shortly afterwards.

Eventually she got her carte de séjour [French equivalent of a U.S. green card], met a wonderful man, and had two children in France. She bought her parents a house back in the old country, and bought her brother a taxi business.

Nadia is never late except when there is a wildcat strike in the Paris transportation system (i.e. all too often....). She is kind, honest, does things without being asked, and sings when she thinks no one is listening. I  admire her more than she knows.

Nadia is paid legally and her children go to a good French public school. They are headed for university and the whole family is solidly middle-class-- the high wages I pay go into the French system, so Nadia and her husband each get six weeks vacation a year, health care and retirement. The French government makes it easy to pay her with something called a Chèque Emploi Service. I write a check to her each month and send a  form off at the same time to the government. All the social costs are deducted automatically from my bank account. It's quite expensive but I have to say it soothes my conscience.

Here in Los Angeles... like everyone else in this part of town, I have Mexicans working for me. Rosa, who worked for a friend of mine here, is Mexican and I feel sure she's not here legally. She doesn't speak English and I'm not sure she can read; but she is intelligent and hardworking and ambitious for her children-- one of them is in a magnet school.  She gets here after an endless ride on two or three buses. The other night her sixteen-year-old daughter did not come home. Rosa says the girl's boyfriend is a cholo (gang member).

"You can only help them so much," said my friend who referred her-- who herself is paying for her daughter's ghetto boyfriend to take college tours and go to summer camp. "The kids fall through the cracks."

Comments

[delphine]

made me think...