a pound of flesh

I’ve been getting well bothered this week.

Well bothered about a lot of things, but mostly about the plight of those less fortunate or those that society turns a blind eye on…and after all that getting well bothered and also taking a long hard look at myself to try to figure out how the hell I can actually do something and how the hell I have always gone about doing something when that something is charitable, I have come to the conclusion that I can start by helping one person. Directly. Me to them. And I can see how I go from there.

We all want to help the world but we don’t know where to start or how to go about doing it because we simply don’t have the skill set or the manpower or the money or the time.

Just one.

Everything begins with just one.

One person.

One moment.

One step.

The journey just takes that first step. Beyond talking about it, beyond thinking about it, beyond planning, just one.

My helper has been talking to me about a friend of hers, someone who is from her village, few doors down, who also works here as a helper.

When I say “helper” I mean a migrant worker. They live in our homes, because there is no other choice. There used to be, but then the government clamped down on this concept of “live out” and so now we have migrant workers being subjected to possibly even worse conditions than they ever have been, living in a city where space is premium…many families of 4 live in less than 70sq m, where do you reckon the helper is sleeping? On the floor of a kids room or maybe on a mattress on the floor of the kitchen, when the day is done.

I don’t want to even think too deeply about this coz it makes me angry.

You see articles written about the ludicrous size of maids rooms, new apartments for sale that are over 1400sqft each and the maids room is literally 3 feet by 7 feet…enough for one person so sleep in there like a corpse in a coffin!

This is how this alternate dimension is, a dimension in which women are slaves to families who don’t want to think about what it must feel like to sleep in a coffin sized room. Our helper might actually be a little bit luckier than most, we don’t starve her, her room is a decent size and we even had an aircon installed when we moved in and learned that it didn’t have one (whoever lived in this apartment before must have had no problem with their helper sweating it out in a room when summer temperatures can hit as high as 38 degrees centigrade!), she has her own private attached bathroom and shower, its not the most fancy set up, but its still private.

This friend of hers she’s been worrying about…the employers don’t let her touch any of the food in the fridge. The mother in the house even counts everything in the fridge before she leaves for work each morning. She’s told she can only eat one slice of the bread a day and the rest of her meals are supposed to be instant noodles with nothing given to her to add to it.

They have this lady here cooking food for them, cooking for the kids, and then she can’t eat any of it.

Three contracts.

Yep, this poor woman has been with this family for three contract signings, thats a two year contract each time!

She waits until Sunday, pays her cousin 20 Hong Kong dollars and her cousin cooks her a bang up meal at her own place of work and brings it out for the one day helpers have off. She then proceeds to stuff all that food into her hungry self to tide her over until the next Sunday when she can get a chance to eat “real food” again.

This poor woman has been going through menopause, or so my helper tells me, and she’s 46. So because she’d been struggling with feeling weighed down in her belly, like her uterus was rebelling against her, she finally caved and went to a private clinic on the one day she has off, Sunday.

She doesn’t know what she has, all she was able to get from the Doctors explanation (some Chinese Doc with limited language ability, no doubt) was “Insides, very bad, not good” and two different antibiotics, an anti-infammatory and some sort of medicine for preventing stomach upsets. I know this because I was the one to help try to explain to the woman what it might be that she has, just from reading her prescription and the doctors test results sheet.

“Abnormal cells”

Thats what is said.

Something about Squamous cells and Epithelial cells and an abnormal test result.

“Come back for retest in 3 months”.

Seriously, what the fuck.

Pap smear, 2 rounds of antibiotics, this woman is not sexually active, heck, not got the life to be! She’s menopausing, she’s in pain, and then when she takes this HKD1000 bill from the doctor that she’s already shelled out for, she takes it to her employer, who by the way is supposed to have insurance for her, the employer dismisses her with, “Oh, we don’t have insurance, this won’t be covered”

And so this poor woman is waiting to figure out, in fear, in that small voiced world of hers, if her employer will reimburse her and that if they don’t she will have to consider quitting.

How the fuck is that the right thing to do?

If they are LEGALLY (you see how I can’t help shouting???) supposed to have insurance, if they don’t, they should at least cover her medical expenses if she does get ill!

Not to mention they don’t fucking feed her!

“She has a choice,” you might say, “She shouldn’t have signed for a third contract if she knew how shit they were,” and on and on.

No!

This is not a choice.

Your choice is between putting your kids through school and putting food on the table somewhere in the Philippines vs nothing. NOTHING.

Many helpers end up being screwed over by agencies who offer to get them a job, and of course, these pariahs wouldn’t even have a commodity if it weren’t for these helpers, and they take money from the helpers and then turn around and take money from prospective employers too, for matching them with a helper! Then they tell the helper she’s not allowed to breathe a word about the money she’s had to pay them, because, guess what? Its not legally ok for agencies to charge helpers! Thats right, in Hong Kong, its not legal! But they ALL do it!

Not all, I went with an agency that doesn’t, they are called “Fair Employment Agency” and so they charge the employer a little bit more, but not a whole lot more. Many agencies will charge an employer a lot and then still charge the helper.

And get this, they will charge the helper anywhere from 5K-9K, off the bat. She will have to pay it BEFORE taking the job on!

So imagine going into a job, not knowing if you will be happy, not knowing if you will be abused, and you are already over a months salary, sometimes 2 months, in debt!

The basic salary in Hong Kong is 4.2K. or something close. And you are supposed to either feed them or provide a food allowance for them. The food allowance is something like HKD960 a month, something like 90 Euro or about USD120, ish. So imagine this, if you were to give them only instant noodles, which run you about 30 bucks for 5 packs…you are really fucking them good, right?

I understand many families see nothing wrong with this because maybe they themselves are stuck eating only instant noodles, but, this here family? Nope. Thats not their problem at all. They are just fuckheads.

So after thinking about how I need to start a helper food bank, a hotline for helpers to just be able to talk to someone, drumming up volunteers to try to interview helpers every weekend about their working conditions and then publish a scathing report to the government and everyone who can pick it up and run with it in the media.I came to the conclusion that…here’s what I am gonna do. This Saturday I will have my helper and I cook up a whole two or three lunchboxes worth of food for this lady, tupperware containers I hope her employer will allow her to put in their fridge, because, legally, you are supposed to have space in your fridge for this purpose…and see how we go.

We will do this every weekend, and I hope she will feel empowered, slowly as it may be initially, to understand her rights and to fight for them.

And if she wants to quit, as sure as the day is long, I will fucking find her a job.

Start where I can, start this week, and just go from there.

Unless she takes the step to speak up and fight for her rights, its gonna be hard, but right now she’s depressed as hell, she’s crying nightly to my helper, she’s alone and feeling abandoned, and I wish there was some way to change the reality of what it is, but I can start with one person, one deed, and try to grow it from there.

My helper has diabetes.

I didn’t know this until after we signed.

I understand why she would keep that shit quiet, its hard to imagine an employer in Hong Kong taking that on without blinking, but I am glad I found out at some point.

She quit her last job after 4 months because they would (again) only leave her instant noodles to eat and sometimes not feed her at all. Her employer would even mark the rice container with a pen to make sure she didn’t eat any of it. So she just gave up, with diabetes, trying to starve like that, and to live on noodles, that is fucked up!

So now I know she’s diabetic, and I know she can control her blood sugar levels through diet, she has all the testing kit stuff and her tablets…so I ensure to the best of my ability that she eats a very balanced, low glycemic index diet. Its good for all of us because, technically, we avoid eating that much in the way of empty carbs, but more importantly, its good for her.

Initially I was a bit freaked out coz, well, what the fuck, maybe I need to feed her a paleo diet and I could barely keep that shit up myself! But then I figured, she can control this with tablets if need be, or she can eat things like brown rice, more veg, avoid crap like chips, and she can go for a walk to try to burn off the excess she wants to. Our day is pretty much done by 7:00pm. So she’s free to bugger off for a walk or whatever, its tough when you live in the same house, to get that time to yourself, but its also got its benefits, like say, if we want to go out for a dinner date, we know someone is there while our kids sleep. Its a mix and match of give and take…and after having hired some painfully mismatched helpers in the past and having known that I gave up a damn good helper in the past too, I am wiser for it.

I like her, I like our Alice.

The kids love her.

She’s quiet, she’s kind, she’s patient, she’s clean, she’s a morning person…and she is a single parent to three kids back in the Philippines. All daughters.

One in college, two in highschool, and Alice is two years younger than me!

Like wow.

Kudos to this lady.

Her in-laws look after the kids, her husband is a douchebag who buggered off with another woman and has another family. His own parents wish he’d drop dead. Yeah, he’s a winner. He used to beat her and so she got him thrown in jail, not once but twice. That’s our Alice.

She’s been with us only a few short months and already I am confident my search for the perfect match has ended. I am old enough to know when I got it good, and she’s good. I will take good care of her and I know she will take good care of all of us, together we will run this household like the tight ship it ought to be.

And this weekend, I am gonna print up and highlight all the important bits of a standard contract and what a helper is entitled to, and I will have Alice give it to her friend along with 2 large containers of real food to get her through the week.

I don’t have a degree in counseling, I don’t know how to start a non-profit (well, I have toyed with this idea in the past and apparently in Hong Kong, its not easy!), but I can cook. And I can listen…and I can try to do what I can in the capacity I am able.

Mmm…

Can you see me with my game face on?

Yep, I’ve got this.

Lot less angry now. 🙂