Mahmoud Ahmad Saudi Gazette Maids, or more precisely recruiting maids from other countries, are the main topic of conversation in family circles these days. With the market opening up for maids from newer countries, many families are considering to bring home new maids. Most families are so desperate to have a maid in the house that it seems as if life would stop if maids were not recruited. Some families consider maids as oxygen they cannot live without. The matter is even worse in a family where a mother is not working; she wants a maid to serve her and her grown-up children. Why does this mother not take care of her own house or at least teach her children basic responsibility of sharing housework? For those who say that times have changed, I agree, times have really changed for the worse. We have become lazier, and depend on outside help for our household chores. I say that most families need to realize the difference between necessities and need. The lines between these two are so blurred that most now see ‘maids' are necessary options to run a family. We have become so lazy that the Labor Ministry is now exploring ‘maids' opportunities in many countries and opening what is called ‘new market' for this business to satisfy the growing demand. I recently read a report in local daily that Saudi Arabia is going to explore new markets and intending now to ‘recruit maids' from new countries like Comoros Islands, Djibouti and Cambodia. The same report quoted sources from the ministry that it is now in the final stages in signing an agreement to recruit maids from Vietnam and Nepal. As talks of recruitment of maids from many countries gained currency with the ministry's statements and it helped spread the rumor that soon maids would be recruited from Turkey. A rumor that an official from the Turkish side denied later in a press statement. Similar rumors had circulated that maids would be recruited from countries from Central Asia, but again there was no credence to it and only that the rumors managed to anger many Saudi women. Maid news is always been making the headlines in the press, especially following the endless negotiations with Indonesia and Philippines to restart the hiring of maids from those countries. Recruitment of maids had been stopped from these two countries because the Philippines and Indonesia wanted to improve the working condition of their citizens and grant them more benefits, raising their salaries and improve their living conditions. Also, the two countries had taken these contractual steps following news of runaway maids, maltreatment by some families and a black market in ‘maids' following the reduction of numbers in the market for maids. The accords between the two countries and the Kingdom have been thrashed out mainly to safeguard the interests of the Saudi families and the hired domestic help. Every now and then we have been reading in the paper that recruitment will resume on so and so day and then it is suspended till further date because one of the parties working on the deal is not agreeing or sticking to a certain condition. Regardless of the recruitment news, we have still not considered the moot issue in this conundrum. Often, recently, we have been accused of being lazy and totally dependent on others, and we have done little to repair this. Long gone are the days when mothers were in control of the house and would teach their children how to attend to housework. In the past they only considered ‘outside' help when the mother was overworked. Even then, they had domestic help who would come to the house for few hours a day to attend to certain jobs and then leave. But those days are a distant dream. New brides these days have a condition in the marriage contract to have a maid in the house. This is ironic, for the women of the house must take charge to make a home. We understand when a family with a special-needs child hires a specialized maid with experience to help the mother take care of such a child or at least hire a maid who could take care of housework while the mother took care of her child. We would also understand the need for a maid in a family with a sick or handicapped wife to help in taking care of household task. But the continuous hiring of maids, when there is no need is something that is still baffling. All the more so, since we still have not solved the problems that had arisen between families and maids when it comes to paying them on time and granting the current ones we have a day off every week. Many families still believe that taking care of infants and elderly are part of the maid's job, which has landed many families in trouble in the past. Some children and infants did die as a result of being put under the hands of these inexperienced maids while others simply decided to escape because they could not bear working in conditions that was not to their liking. Maids are still overworked, sometimes for more than 15 hours a day, and still many families believe that this hard work is equal to the salaries, which sometimes is pitiful, they are getting. From time to time, we come to know from the papers that the Labor Ministry is going to open the doors for recruitment from new countries in either Africa or Southeast Asia. There are advertisements in the paper every day of a sponsor wanting to ‘sell' and transfer the sponsorship of his maid to the highest buyer. Then there is the Ramadan season when maids are in high demand and they are paid double and triple to what a maid is paid normally. Seeing this push and pull of ‘maids', sometimes I am left wondering whether after some years will there be any countries left from where we did not recruit ‘maids'? — Mahmoud Ahmad can be reached at [email protected]
