Month: June 2011

and came home with something fun for our house! I tried to take a picture of the sign displaying the temperature, but I didn’t want the ladies in the burqas to think I was taking a picture of them so I had to snap it quickly. I didn’t capture it, but it said 42 C at 5:30 in the evening, about 107 F.

I didn’t take any pictures in the sook because we were shopping for something specific and the easiest way to get the price jacked up on an item you want is to look like a tourist. As it was, we looked plenty touristy and every shop we passed I had people waving scarves and pashminas in my face saying, “3 rial. Very good price madame. Beautiful scarf for you.” It feels rude, but you just have to ignore them and keep walking or you’d never get anywhere.

I’m looking for some metal and glass lanterns, like these:

photo credit: maroque.co.uk

photo credit: nj.com

No luck on the lanterns yet. I mean, there were tons of lanterns, but they were all cheapy cheap or too expensive for something I suspected was made in China. I’m waiting to find some nice “real” ones before dropping any rial for them.

We did find something that I’ve been wanting since we got here:

two beautiful floor pillows. We were able to talk him down to 25 rial for both which was a good price since I had seen the large size for 30 each and they didn’t have all the beading and patchwork that these have. I think we’re going to go back and get one or two more since they’re great for sitting on, putting your feet up, and if you’re short on storage space, they work great to store excess clothing.

We are certainly not short on storage space and we don’t have much excess clothing, but they come unfilled and I was dying to use them. We don’t have any extra pillows or towels, but then I had the bright idea of taking all our jackets, jeans, sweatshirts and other warm clothes from Monterey and using those as filling. The large cushion took all those clothes, plus 5 beach towels. It is huge. I was trying to find cheap fabric or other stuffing material, but those items are all pretty expensive here (what isn’t?) and the clothing makes a nice, supportive cushion.

I had nothing left to stuff this smaller one, so I took all the leftover plastic grocery bags in the house and stuffed it as full as I could. It needs a lot more filling so that’s why it still looks slouchy and ready to topple over.

We had a great night of shopping, topped off by the only cheap thing we’ve found in Oman. The soft serve ice cream cones at McDonalds are only 100 baisa each (25 cents) so we hit the drive-through on the way home and for  $1.25 made everyone happy. Next time we’ll have to get a 6th cone, since the boys had to take turns giving her bites of theirs since Camille kept yelling for more each time she finished a bite. I think we can afford it.

That’s how much it costs to get a piece of the good life here. It is also the paltry sum we pay Lucy each month to clean, do laundry, cook, wash the car, take out the trash, babysit the kids, and everything else she does 8 (or more) hours/day, 5 days/week. And that’s after giving her a raise from $416 because at the end of the month we felt like 160 RO/month was a ridiculously small amount to pay for the improvement to our quality of life that she brought to our home. The crazy part? We pay more than 95% of people here who hire household help.*

*Not an actual statistic, but a pretty solid guestimate based on gossip, plus some help from my friend google.

One of the strange things about living in Oman is that it doesn’t feel like we’re living in a middle eastern country because we are surrounded by people who aren’t from here. In Egypt there were Egyptians everywhere we went. Here everyone is from the Philippines, Sri Lanka, India, and Pakistan. And why do they come here? To work.  

I looked up the info for India because that’s the comparison that interested me since Lucy is from India. I wasn’t sure why a woman would spend the last 20 years working in a foreign country, especially when she had to leave her baby back in India to be raised by her sister. Lucy told me this heartbreaking story of a time that she went home to visit and her 2 year old daughter yelled at her, “You’re not my mom! This is my mom!” Ouch.

According to various sources and my rudimentary currency conversion skills, the average per capita income in India is $86 per month, about $1000/year. And that’s after factoring in that salaries in India have risen more than 10% annually for the past few years. Since Lucy makes more than 5 times that amount, it turns out to be a true win.win.win situation, I guess. She can work and live here with minimal expenses (she has her housing and medical provided) and send almost every dollar she earns back to her family in India.

The Omani government enters into work agreements with the various countries that send people here to work. These include minimum wage and provisions for vacation time and medical coverage. These agreements are why people say things like “Indian maids are cheaper than Filipino maids,” because they literally have a lower minimum wage that has been set by their governments. And that partly explains why people put their race in the ads on the job board. I guess so you know what price range to aim for.

In India, where an accountant with a Master’s degree and 12 years experience made an average of 11k last year, making 6k/year for cleaning is a pretty good deal. Of course it depends who you work for. Many of these girls are hired by “agencies” who promise them $400/month, but end up working 6 or even 7 days a week, often for 16 hours a day and are only paid $200/month. But since they are uneducated and it’s more than they’d be earning back in their home country, they accept it. The minimum wage agreement for an Indian maid is 75 RO ($195), but if the employer provides food then it is legal to pay less than the minimum. 

Lucy has a much better situation than most maids in this country. Not because she’s working for us, but because she is able to live with her husband in a nice house (he works as a private chef) and she has been employed by European embassy employees for the past 15 years. Embassy employees are known for paying better, giving better benefits, and not being as difficult to work for. Sadly many of the maid situations here are a short step above human trafficking or slave labor with stories of passports being held, not being allowed to go out unescorted, and no way to return home.

I don’t have the answer to solve the exploitation of maids on a large scale, all Josh and I can do is treat people the way we would want to be treated. And it’s impossible not to treat Lucy like a valued member of our family when she calls the kids “my boys” or “my baby” and tells them she’ll make whatever they want to eat (Carter: chicken fried rice, Caleb: lasagna). Or when she sings to the baby as she walks around the house, rocking her to sleep when my attempts have failed. What we get in return for $468 is actually priceless.

Today Caleb is flopping around and pouting at the table because he doesn’t want to write the 5 or 6 little words I asked him to write. Since I’m not going to argue with him about it, I go in the kitchen to see how Lucy is doing and to check on Camille. I come back and Bob hands me a scrap of paper with this written on it: blTe Hll 

He asks, “Mom can you read that?” Using my best decoding skills I guess, “Happy Birthday?” To which he replies, “No. It says ‘bloody hell.'”

Really? You fight me when I ask you to write “when,” but you’ll write British curses of your own initiative?

I ask him where he heard that phrase and he says, “Harry Potter.” Of course. Thank you so much Harry. So I explain to him that he shouldn’t say that because in England that’s kind of like saying the s-word or the f-word. He says, “Dad already told me that, but I was trying to spell it and Carter was trying to figure out how to write the f-word on his paper.” Carter protests that he already erased it from his paper so it doesn’t count.

Great, now I have two writers who specialize in cursing. They’ll probably grow up to spray paint graffiti on freeway overpasses. Good thing they’re both horrible spellers. If you ever see the phrase, “fog you!” on a wall you’ll know who wrote it.

After they finished school for the day the boys decided to roll back the carpet and see who could spin the longest and fastest before falling down. All I could think was that the desk and the chairs had really sharp corners and I still didn’t know where the hospital was, but decided to let them live on the edge.

They set up head to head faceoffs where the winner stayed to face the next opponent. Caleb won a lot and as his prize . . .

he felt like throwing up. I wouldn’t say he turned exactly green, but he was a sickly pale yellow color by the time he called it quits and I was wondering if I needed to go get a bucket.

Carter copied Caleb’s technique of spinning just fast enough to look like he was trying, but not so fast that he’d lose control. He’s the only one that didn’t feel like puking by the time they called it quits.

School isn’t even out yet and they are already running out of things to do. Good thing we have a bazillion and one episodes of MacGyver and the A-Team to watch while we wait for things to stop cooking outside.

Baby girl is an eater. A big eater. Who wants some of whatever you’re having whether it’s chicken curry with rice, beef samosas, lasagna, or pieces of eggplant from the moussaka that Lucy made. And she’s not very polite about it. When she sees food she starts yelling and grunting and kicking her feet until you share with her.

***These videos aren’t terribly exciting, unless you happen to be related to the greedy, grunty eater. Then you’ll probably find them pretty entertaining.