The Help: A Tale of Two Houseladies

Wait, they're supposed to have uniforms?

As mentioned, running the household requires a few extra folks to  clean, cook and keep the place together. Househelp in Ghana is not only highly affordable for an expat, but also surprisingly utilitarian in practice.

In Canadian terms, Mr. and Mrs. O are fairly humble folk - they keep a (generally) clean and tidy house and property themselves and grew up without a dishwasher. Coming to Ghana, it was reiterated that househelp will be needed and one should discerned carefully. Groceries need to be bought (and haggled for at the market), food needs to be cleaned (and disinfected) and the harmattan winds fill the house with Sahara dust.

Mrs. O, being an at-home mother, has an aversion to help, including having strange people in the house in general. While other expats have a combination of live-in nanny, cook, cleaner and gardener, Mr. and Mrs. O decided that having someone come by a couple of days per week to shop, prep and cook food and clean the house would be plenty. And ideally they would be able to watch Little Miss from time to time.

So in the end, the couple is in a curious situation, with two part-time helpers.

The cook was highly recommended by a departing colleague as someone who is an excellent cook (others confirmed this unprompted). She does Indian curries, Mexican burritos, pad Thai and other fantastic dishes. She also reportedly watches children at Sunday school. Great, right?

Unfortunately, if she is great with kids, not so much with Little Miss. They just don't click. She probably considers Little Miss a whiny little princess who does not listen to adults. This is entirely a fair assessment, but for adequate compensation, the employers request checking one's opinions at the door. Her cleaning skills are also meh. However, good cooks are in short supply and in high demand from expats, so Mr. and Mrs. O are a bit beholden to her, lest they have to start cooking their own rice like shmucks.

Enter the cleaner: Noticing how great their neighbour's part-time helper is with their child and how clean their house is, Mrs. O decided to engage her for a day per week of cleaning and child-minding while Mrs. O goes out for groceries (yes, she enjoys this sort of thing).

Yet helpers are people too and they do not exist in a vacuum. Her job has downsides: while the work pays well, she has children and living in Accra is not cheap. Her commute is over two hours each way and she has little time to spend with her own little ones. So she is currently looking to get out of the game and get into the less profitable but more fulfilling dream of hairdressing. So Mr. and Mrs. O are not sure how much time they will have with her, but while she figures out her situation, they can keep her afloat.

This has been an interesting experiment in understanding one's perceptions of class, gender, humanity and humility. A person leaves their home and commutes to a much nicer one to do the chores that the employers are too lazy to do themselves at a price that the employers would not do themselves in their own country. Yet this is by local standards a well-paying job for women with little education and affords them a significant amount of opportunity. For Mr. and Mrs. O, while they live a life of privilege, this is also a paradoxically humbling experience - it reminds them of just how much they have and to be grateful for it.

Ugh, good help is so hard to find. *sips gin & tonic*