We hired a maid today. Well, we took the first steps toward hiring her. One of the unique things about Oman is all the rules regarding hiring household help. In this country, all the maids are from foreign countries: India, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, etc. So every person you hire has to be sponsored by you, (insert lots of boring paperwork info here), and in our case, vetted by the American embassy.
As an employer you are also responsible for providing housing (part time employees are not allowed), food or a food allowance, medical care, a living wage and a plane ticket to their home country once every two years. Also, if they don’t work out and you have to fire them, they either have to be hired and sponsored by a new person within 30 days or you have to buy them a one-way ticket back to their home country.
All this is WAY more complicated than when we hired Madiha and sounded a little scary too, but the idea of someone cleaning the kitchen for me every day quickly conquered any fears I might have had regarding a stranger living in my house.
So our potential maid is from India (she has to pass a background check through the embassy before we can officially hire her). I can’t tell how old she is except that she is older than me because she has at least two grown kids back home in India and her daughter is giving birth to her first grandchild this fall. But she looks a lot younger than she must be. She has zero gray hair and I envy her skin cause she has almost no wrinkles. Anyway, she’s this tiny little thing, barely taller than Calvin, speaks really good English, was very happy, and seemed to love the kids from the first moment she met them.
On the plus side, she has a husband who works as a personal chef in Muscat, so she won’t be living with us. She will come to our house from 7am-3pm five days a week and any time we need her for anything else, she’ll be available. She cooks, cleans, and watches kids. If she could only exercise for me too . . .