Today is a strange one.  This morning our first “empleada,” Marta, began work at 8.  Meaning, we now have a cleaning lady.  WHAT?  Why don’t you just clean your own little apartment?!  It’s just the two of you!  You don’t have kids!!  You don’t work full time even!  I know, I know.  It’s part of the culture here.  It’s cheap.  I’m taking it as part of the experience of living here.  It is sure to provide hours (or at least minutes…I already have worries about this lady) of entertainment for y’all.  We always have the windows open and never use air conditioning, so the place is constantly covered with dust and dirt.  There are all kinds of ways I can justify it.  Al fin, it’s just plain nice to have someone do all of this.  Laundry, mop the floors, heck, right now she’s wiping off the outside of the cabinets.  When is the last time you even thought about doing that?!

So this will likely take many more posts to explain, but there’s this whole crazy culture around these cleaning ladies.  There are a billion rules about how to treat them, how much to pay them, what they can eat while they’re working.  You should be nice to them, but not too nice.  You should be authoritative, but not mean.  A few of these rules:

• The woman of the house is the one who issues the instructions to the empleada.  As we all know, the woman of the house is the one who ALWAYS cares for all household matters, so obviously she is the authority here.  A big change from the workplace in Panamá where a female boss gets no respect, not even from her female employees.  A male boss gets immediate results.
• You just plain can’t be friends with your empleada.  They will think you are weak and stupid, and they will begin to manipulate you.
• If you feel sorry for your empleada’s situation and want to help her to get an education, for example, you just can’t…or rather, shouldn’t.  It won’t work.  Period.  My friend from high school who moved here 10 years ago said this is really hard.  She’s the nicest person ever, and she wanted to help a young girl who worked for her by helping her to go to college.  The girl ended up using the money to buy shoes or jeans or something – wasted it all – and ended up exactly where she started.  There are a million stories like this.
• You have to tell them exactly what food they can eat while they are eating and what food they can’t have.  You generally have to feed them breakfast and lunch when they are working.  One woman told me that her daughters drink Tropicana orange juice, which is $5/carton here.  She tells her empleada that she can’t drink that juice.  She buys cheaper juice for her.
• You have to tell them exactly how much food they can eat when they are working.  This same woman told me that she told her empleada that she could make a sandwich using the ham in the fridge.  The empleada used ALL the ham.  She ate the whole package.
• You have to be very literal and very specific about your instructions and about the privileges that you give them.  Another story:  A woman had a live-in nanny/housekeeper for a number of months.  When the woman and her husband went on vacation with the kids for a weekend, they told the nanny she could watch whatever she wanted on tv, including pay-per-view.  I guess it was a few years ago.  🙂  When they came back, they found out that the nanny had just constantly had the tv on with a pay-per-view movie playing.  Not the same one, but different ones, one after another, for the whole weekend.  They had a huge bill.  But the reasoning, so they say, is that the nanny was told that she could do it, so she did exactly as she was told.  No need for common sense to kick in.

People talk about these women as a class, as a singular group.  It sounds awful.  “You have to treat THEM this way.”  “You can’t let THEM have the good juice because they’ll drink the whole $5 bottle in one day!”  “If you let them get away with being late once, they’ll never be on time again.”  I did it in the rules above.  It’s how people talk about them.  It’s the culture.

I can’t imagine being one of these women.  They are treated this way, so they must be forced to behave in a certain way to get by.  I imagine that you get to the point where you have to try to take advantage or manipulate your employer because otherwise you’re going to get treated like a slave.  Or maybe not.  I don’t know.  This is all so foreign to me!  Aren’t there empleadas out there who are honest hard-working people who do a good job and earn the money that they are owed and get along with their employers?  And aren’t there employers who treat their employees well?  Or is the entire system too messed up by all these people who don’t treat each other well and by the stories that everyone tells to ever be decent?

I’m already jaded, and we’ve had an empleada in our employ for a little over an hour!  I’m nervous.  I’m completely on edge.  I’m don’t know if I should be following her from room to room to make sure my stuff is safe.  (Luckily, we didn’t bring much with us, so we don’t have much to take!).  I think carefully about each thing that I say to her and how I say it.  Be nice, but firm.  Say it with authority, but don’t be a jerk.  Set precedent from the very beginning.

I even dressed up.  Since we got here, and especially since I got sick and since I’ve been recovering (yep, still recovering…you don’t want details.  Ever heard of Clostridium difficile or C. Diff.?  Don’t look it up.  TMI.), I’ve been wearing shorts, tank tops, and my rainbows (flip-flops for Eric…I swear, we’ve been together for over three years and he still has no idea what I mean when I say Rainbows.  Yep, STILL means my same flip-flops!  Clearly he didn’t go to Carolina.) every day.  Yes, I look like a Gringa at the grocery store, but guess what?  I’m a Gringa.  They’re gonna know it no matter what I wear or no matter what color I dye my hair.  I’m pale, my Spanish isn’t up to par…there’s no hope.  I’m gonna be comfortable.

But today, I got up super early, showered, and put on a dress and heels, hoping to look like una dama, a lady, a respectable woman that this woman, Marta, should listen to, like, and…well…respect!  I think the height helps my confidence too.  It’s hard to be 5’3″ and confident.  It really is.  I don’t know how my sister does it as a pediatric CT surgeon.  She’s my size, but when she walks into the OR, it is HER OR.  It’s HER surgery.  The patient whose life is on the line is her responsibility, and she has to command respect from everyone working with her.  I try to do it in the courtroom too, but at least I have some distance from the judge.  I don’t have to stand right next to him or her and show exactly how short I am.  It helps.  🙂

One of these days, I’ll have to go into all the politics about how Panamanian empleadas are different from Colombian and Nicaraguan empleadas b/c of changes in immigration laws passed by the last (very corrupt) president of Panama and all the new prejudices and attitudes that each group has towards the other because of all of this.  It’s amazing how involved all of this is.  This ain’t Merry Maids!

I’ll let you know how the rest of the day goes…