On Having Your Underwear Ironed

I’ve described other day-to-day aspects of living here, but have not yet talked about the bizarreness of having a domestic staff. In fact, I’ve been trying to write this post all week but have been having a tough time sorting through the cultural nuance, internal conflict and new relationships in a way that does the topic justice. Nonetheless, here we go…

We are warned before coming that it is expected that mzungus will employ local Malawians and provide much needed jobs. From the comfort of our Somerville living room we consider this concept in the abstract, conclude that it makes us entirely uncomfortable, and put the matter aside until it needs to be faced. Which turns out to be sooner rather than later.

Phinious, our housekeeper, is already living in the so-called “boy’s quarters” when we rent our place. Our lovely landlady, Barbara, hates to displace people, so she has allowed him to stay on after the previous tenants sell and leave. She encourages us to give him a chance. The first time we meet, a few days before our formal move-in date, Phinious is meek and silent and the usually generous Barbara, who has translated much of the conversation, uncharacteristically informs us that many Malawian domestic staff don’t work very hard and have to be constantly prodded. Already feeling entirely weird about having someone do our day-to-day household chores, we depart feeling like we’ve made a huge mistake renting our own place at all.

Phinious must just have been nervous about his fate the day we met because in reality, he takes a great deal of initiative and his English is quite good. From ensuring the garden is immaculately swept and watered to hand-washing, sun-drying and crisply pressing our clothes (including underwear), he finds ways to keep productively busy all day with rare intervention from me. [As a side note, the only reason we allow Phinious to go to the trouble of ironing underwear is because according to our guide book, there is a species of fly that lays eggs on drying laundry which will subsequently hatch in your skin unless clothes are ironed first. A fate we are hoping to avoid, especially in sensitive regions!] In conversation I’ve learned that Phinious finished secondary school and has a coveted MSCE, but thinks housekeeping is his best option for now as he saves to try to go back to school to do HIV/AIDS intervention and care work.

Patrick is our night guard. He arrives on his bicycle (apparently from about two hours distance by cycle) at five pm – just as dusk falls. When I ask if he would prefer to try to find something closer to his home, he assures me that there are plenty of other people there who have taken the available jobs nearer there, and that he is more than happy to travel so far for employment. Patrick is older and had definitive views on how he should do his job and how we should take care of the garden. He sits outside our house all evening, departing before we arise in the morning to rest at home where a wife and five young children await. Like Phinious, he is responsible and self-starting, leaving us to wonder whether Barbara’s comment was colored by local beliefs about “lower classes”, or whether we’ve just gotten lucky (soon after we moved in, Barbara’s housekeeper stole the $4000 US that we’d pay for our security and first three month’s rent and has subsequently been located with the cash on his person and jailed.)

We’ve acquired a new American roommate (as of yesterday) and a Malawian renter of the other boy's quarters (who we met during our stay at Annie’s Lodge when we first arrived) so there are now five people living here and others that come and go. Compared to many other expats, this is a tiny staff. Some of the folks I’ve met have 6 or more adult employees, some of whom live at the house with their families, but we are thankful to have kept things small. It’s a different feeling of community – a delicate balance of civility, nuanced power structures, tentative friendship and compromise. Among us we share the newspaper, sometimes food, information, language instruction and water and power outages. More intimate than US living and simultaneously more formal and hierarchical.

As I haven’t processed through feelings about all of this, I could probably blather on indefinitely trying to investigate shades of interpretation, but I’ll leave things here for now.