International Women’s Day: Treat house helps with dignity
Maasai girls during a traditional ceremony. All girls need to be protected and their talents nurtured so that they would reach their potential as they go through transition into adulthood. Their dignity needs to be respected. PHOTO | FILE
Most families with young ones, where the mother is employed or doing business (self employed), most of the time, have a house helper. As we celebrate this year’s International Women’s Day (tomorrow), I would like us to give a thought to the “house helps’ industry.”
Today in most towns, there are bureau or individual agents who are ‘specialized’ in just searching for house girls and connecting them with the prospective employers. The business is highly informal, and when the house help steps into the new employer’s place, she becomes more like part of that family.
But very unfortunate, there are some people who mistreat those house girls and make them suffer. In some cases, the girl is never allowed to stay in the sitting room, eat with the family, and all that.
Just take an example of a house girl called Vumilia, from very early in the morning to very late at night, she works like a donkey. She hardly has time to rest. She serves a large family with about five children, the man and the woman of the house, and never leaving relatives in the house.
Vumilia wakes up at 4.30am. She makes breakfast and prepares children ready to go school and making sure the shoes for everyone in the family are clean. By the time the kids leave home for school at 6am, she has already done so much. Note that, most of the time there is no tap water in that house, so she has to get the water from a borehole.
Thereafter, she has to clean up the five-bedroomed house, and the lady of the house wants everything to be cleaned every day. The children are not allowed to do any manual task at home, so she even has to make their beds everyday and clean up their mess.
Then Vumilia starts washing clothes for the whole household, including visitors (if they are any). Despite being the person who cooks all the food for the entire family, she can only eat after everyone else in the house has eaten, and just eats in the kitchen. This girl gets very tired but when she remembers her mother’s suffering, she forgets all her pains. At the end of the month, her salary of Sh50,000 is sent to her mother, who has to take care of her younger siblings after their father left for Dar es Salaam some years ago and has never returned home or even communicated.
The story of Vumilia is the story of many house helps, who are routinely overworked, underpaid but worse still, misused, mistreated, and abused.
It’s paramount that working mothers who need house girls must treat them with dignity. The wise elders will tell you that never mistreat the one who cooks for you. In folklore, we hear of people being poisoned using food. The house girls may not do that when cooking for you, but some will drool on your food because you mistreat them. Others take revenge on your young children.
A house girl is a human being, just like you and me. It’s just their economic status (not financially well off) that has made them where they are today. They have not chosen to be poor only circumstances made them so. Thus, they should be treated with dignity. Some of them later in life succeed very well. For instance, some are in great business, and others have become great family people.
I have come across an interesting story of a former house help in Kenya, Agnes Kogei, who, despite all the odds, she is currently a paediatric ward manager. She is a nurse by profession, and says “your beginning does not determine your destiny”.
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Saumu Jumanne lectures at the Dar es Salaam University College of Education (DUCE)
