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.