I grew up in a house where you never hired anyone to do anything –
not paint the house, not mow, not shovel snow in the winter, and certainly not
clean. My parents, like my husband
Olof’s, were huge proponents of child labor.
So when I first moved to California as a bride, it was a while before
my then-husband and I ultimately decided to succumb to the luxury of an
alternate-week cleaning lady, and a mow-and-blow service. But I
had no clue how to hire anybody.
Since the reason I finally opted for cleaning services was that I
was working full time and wasn’t going to be in the house, the first question I
asked of an applicant in my early naiveté was if written instructions in
English would be acceptable, or did she want to take her chances with my
Spanish?
Initially
I would be puzzled when I came home and found that although my lovely
hard-working new hire had checked off all the things on my list, many hadn’t
been done. I had to conclude that
although I thought my college Spanish was adequate (if a little heavy on the
dictionary consultation), it probably sounded to her
like a Japanese calculator manual.
But what I actually discovered (I’m a slow learner) was that the
problem was more serious than my helper not being able to read my Spanish. She could not read, period. Cleverly (and I was actually pretty dazzled
by this), she identified cleaning products by colors of the cleaning product
bottles or pictures on the labels.
Unfortunately, the blue bottle at my house contained a very different
cleaning product than the blue bottle at another customer’s house as I
discovered when she cleaned my sofa with X-14 mildew remover for showers. When I really understood the reading problem
fully was when I walked into my kitchen with several bags of groceries and fell
flat on my back, my cleaning lady having cleaned the hardwood floor with lemon oil
furniture polish. She pointed tearfully
at the label and kept repeating madera
(wood).
I’m actually hugely sympathetic with language issues (and
immigrants in general), having had a mother who taught ESL and having lived a
total of three years in two separate foreign countries whose language I did not
speak at all when I arrived. I would
literally have starved to death had I had to earn a living in either place. I have
painfully clear memories of entertaining the locals with my fractured efforts
at their native tongue, never mind the total frustration of trying to deal with
bureaucratic and technical snafus in a language that is not one’s own. (Try negotiating a phone tree in Portuguese.) But
it took my spine about six months to fully recover from the madera incident.
My
early gardening hires tended to present a different problem. They had a very fluid idea of “Thursday”,
which sometimes meant Monday, and other times meant three Wednesdays from
now. My yard would morph into
quasi-jungle mode fairly rapidly. Tracking
them down was problematical due to an ever changing list of contact information
(whatever I had was always the “old” number) but I still recall with fondness
the endless list of creative excuses for their absences:
Gardener: My trock, ees brawken. (Looking at some of these
trucks, this was not hard to imagine.)
But
far more often, it was: My abuelita [grandmother] in Guadalajara,
she die.
Inga
(puzzled): “Didn’t she just die four
months ago?”
Gardener: That was my other abuelita.
Gardener
(two months later): My abuelita in
Morelia, she die.
Inga: I thought both of your abuelitas have already died.
And didn’t they live in
Guadalajara?
Gardener: Oh, theese one, she is not my real abuelita. She is abuelita
in my heart. (Pats heart.)
The
abuelitas continued to die like flies
over the next year. I have to say that
the mortality rate of abuelitas in
Mexico at that time was staggering. OK,
they’re abuelitas, they’re old. But as far as I could see, there was a
serious abuelita epidemic going on.
But
ultimately, I got the hang of both hiring help in general and hiring
international help in specific, and have been lucky to have same wonderful people
for decades at a time. But I definitely
look back on that first year with a smile.
Even when I feel that lingering twinge in my spine.
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