Abdul Rahman Al-Shalash Al-Jazirah “Please, help! I need a housemaid for the holy month of Ramadan immediately at any price!” This was the message sent by a Saudi woman on social media. “I have children. My housemaid left for her country on her annual vacation. I got entangled. I do not know what to do. My office cannot give me a vacation to look after my house and kids,” the women wrote. In fact, this passionate message expresses the situation of many Saudi families who are looking for a housemaid to help them with house chores which double during the fasting month. Looking for a housemaid these days is just like looking for a needle in a haystack. The woman said the housemaid should just be good. She did not ask for an “excellent” or a “superb” housemaid because she is sure that they do not exist. In our common understanding, the excellent housemaid is one who takes entire responsibility for the house. This type of housemaid is rare if not entirely nonexistent. Saudi women who have excellent housemaids will not permit them to be seen by other Saudi women lest they steal them by offering them bigger salaries and better working conditions. If you are not careful, then suddenly one day, and for no good reason at all, your excellent driver or housemaid will ask you for a final exit visa. He or she must have made arrangements with other Saudi employers who offered them recruitment visas which they can use to return to the Kingdom very quickly. In order to get even a slight increase in their salaries, housemaids are always ready to run away from the original sponsors who brought them to this country. They are now also running away to other GCC countries where they are better paid and better treated. Other GCC countries have become real competitors of the Kingdom in the world of household help. Many housemaids and drivers in the Kingdom cannot wait for a chance to go these countries. The qualities of an excellent housemaid in the Kingdom are cleanliness, obedience, working for long hours, working under pressure, treating children nicely, taking very little rest time, good at cooking, excellent at laundry, not using the mobile phone and remaining healthy all the time. There are a number of factors which have led to the decrease in the number of excellent housemaids and the increase in the bad ones. Among others, these factors include running away in pursuit of better pay, the suspension of recruitment from Indonesia and the high prices which have created a black market for housemaids. It may be hard to imagine, but the salary of a good housemaid during Ramadan can be more than SR4,000! If you think that this is high, what about the cost of a release for the transfer of sponsorship? To give a housemaid a release to transfer her iqama (residence permit) to another Saudi, the original sponsor may easily ask for SR30,000 or SR40,000. It is a real tragedy for some Saudi families who have been forced to welcome Ramadan without a housemaid. Their fasting may not be complete without an Indonesian housemaid to help them.
