Birth_Day

July 15 was my domestic helper, Susan’s (name changed to help protect her identity) birthday. Being thousands of miles away from home, I bet she must be home sick and wanting to share her joyous day with her family. Susan is a very hardworking girl and has helped me a lot in the past 7 months, taking care of my kids and my entire household, relieving me of the burden that I’ve been carrying for the past many years. Thus, I really appreciate her and truly value her presence in my family. Without her, I’ll still be doing the laundry, never-ending house chores, worrying about 3 meals, getting my girl ready for school plus lots and lots of other stuff on top of my 9 to 5 job. Indonesians tend to have very curly locks and I can see that she was having a tough time managing it. As a lady myself, I could identify with her “stress” and the “ai sui” (爱美 translation: “I wanna be beautiful”) nature. Therefore on the weekend before her birthday, as a token of appreciation, I took her to the hair salon to have her hair “rebound”. She was so happy and really appreciated my gesture. A birthday without a cake sounds weird, isn’t it? So, on her birthday, after work, I rushed to buy her a birthday cake. But birthday cake without present, also weird right? So, I proceeded to buy her a dress… a nice black dress because I think most girls would like it… plus a pair of ear-rings. Now tell me, which girl wouldn’t like that??? And as it turned out, tears of joy were streaming down her cheeks as she thanked us for that small surprise “party” that we threw her. I was also happy because my small act was able to make another person so happy… and truly, I like that feeling… Many people failed to consider the fact that their domestic helpers are also human being with feelings and emotions. They came from far and have to leave everything and everyone they love behind just to earn that minimum wages that we offer them. And for that RM500, they have to practically work their butt out. Waking up as early as 6 a.m., they have to get breakfast and kids (if any) ready, sweep and mop the floor, do laundry, ironing, cooking, washing and some even have to wash cars daily. And they only get to go to bed at 9 or 10 p.m. Some of these helpers tend to be slow because they came from a different culture and life back at home could be at a very slow pace too. Many of us, employers tend to have a number of spoiled irons, because most of the time, they were not used to operating the “canggih” electrical items. At times, communication plays a part in the helpers’ mistakes. See, bahasa Indonesia and bahasa Malaysia, though somewhat the same but the way the grammars are used are totally different. Hence, a lot of times they do not understand our instructions and being afraid of getting scolded, they tend to just keep quiet even though there are many ??? in their minds. I do hear of a lot cases where the helpers “curi makan” be it fruits, chocolates or biscuits. Some helpers are very young, some in their teens, and hence they still somehow act and think like a kid. Kids like food that is appealing to them and the helpers being like kids, curious, also tend to want to try it. But afraid of getting scolded, they will resort to many “secretive” ways of getting it… just like kids… Bottomline is, before we proceed to blame or scold our domestic helpers, please give a thought or two to their upbringing, their cultural background and most of all their feelings and emotion… And the things that they spoilt, those are material things, things that can be replaced, just that we need to spend more money replacing them. But the words that we uttered, those that hurt their feelings, they will forever remain in their minds and no amount of money can erase them from their memories. I may be naïve but I believe that if we show our kindness and appreciation to them, they will also repay our kindness with their commitment and honesty…