Confessions...

Last week I mopped my floors for the first time in two months.  Yet, my floors remain fairly clean.  How can this be?

You've got it .. I have hired help.  For over two months, I have had a cleaner coming for four hours a day, two times per week.  It really wasn't difficult to get used to, and I have come to look forward to her visits.  I have had so much more time for my family - and that time was very limited when we first arrived.

Domestic help is pretty common in most households in Malaysia.  For less than $300 U.S. dollars, you can have a full-time live in maid that will cook, clean and take care of the kids. Most of the maids are foreign, either from Indonesia or the Philippines.  They are able to make more money here than they would in their home countries, thus they choose to leave families and even their young children behind. (A very sad situation .. but that is for another post.)

Initially I was against the idea of help.  Many people before me have raised children and kept up their house without help.  Why couldn't I?  Well .. I am not Super-Mom.  Living in a foreign country has been more difficult than I expected and I was exhausted.  So, I swallowed my pride and confessed that I could use help.  

Now, what kind of help would we get?  Being that I am uncomfortable with the idea of live-in help, we had to find another option.  (I am a fairly private person and I want to be sure that we are the ones raising our children.) As an alternative, some people choose to have a live-out maid. This option is more expensive, since the maid then needs to buy her own food and have her own housing accommodations.  It is an option that we've considered, but we haven't gone through with it.

In the meantime we chose to use a cleaning service.  Our cleaner came Tuesdays and Fridays and cleaned our entire house (all for less than $100USD per month).  She learned to work around what we were doing, which included Ella's school and Ezra's naps.  It was wonderful!

But, last week things changed.  Our cleaning agency called to tell me that our cleaner ran away!  (Our agency hired Indonesian maids.)  Apparently she was the leader of the group of maids and they all left.  We were on our own for the day.  I'm not sure why the maids ran .. but I can guess:  Our agency paid for their work permits (which allowed them to be here legally).  As a result, however, they aren't allowed to quit their job like my husband can.  They are indebted to whoever paid for their permits and since their salaries are so small, there is no way that they could pay that money back.  (I compare their situation to being indentured servants.)   If they wanted to leave, they needed to run!

With our cleaner gone, my kids have been trying to help me, but they just aren't as efficient.

Our agency called to let me know that I will have a cleaner coming again next week.  They have hired and are training new cleaners.  Being without the help has allowed me to appreciate how wonderful the service can be.  We pray that we will always show kindness to whoever is working for us.