Adventist

The lady who comes to clean my flat twice a week handed in her notice via SMS at 11:30 pm the other night. She’s a hard worker, and in the almost three years that we have been in our particular commercial partnership, she has had to put up with a lot, including hoax (but no less terrifying) kidnapping threats, living with a dog for a few months (a new experience for both of us) and a lot of cleaning up on mornings after. I have absolutely no complaints: she has been loyal and dependable but now wants to spend more time looking after her children. I wish her well.

Now the search starts for a replacement. In other cultures this might be viewed as an entirely pointless exercise: why looking for a cleaning lady when by doing so one is admitting that one cannot clean up after oneself? In Latin America, however, the opposite is the norm: one leads such busy lives that one simply cannot be expected to clean up after oneself. A little lazy, perhaps, but it has worked fine for me.

The problem is finding a person one can rely on. This is an employee, about whom one normally knows the bare minimum, who will be working in one’s house while one is at work. There is hardly ever any personal interaction: I think I saw my previous cleaning lady about ten times in person over something close to thirty months. Every month I left her payment on the kitchen table, and when I came back from work it was gone. I never saw her, but I knew when she had come: my floor was clean, my dishes washed, my clothes ready to be worn, my bed made. This is a person who exists in spaces that are to me entirely intimate and yet I never see her. Trust is therefore paramount: she is an almost total stranger and she knows more about my daily life than most of my closest friends.

One often hears tales of things going wrong with such employees. A friend of mine came home early once to find their employee going through the belongings of someone who was on holiday in the belief that because they had left the country, they wouldn’t be needing their snail shell facial cream; another had a pair of crutches disappear for a week or so only to just as mysteriously reappear; one friend became so convinced that his employee was taking money from him that he set up a hidden camera to catch her unawares.

A colleague recently told me about one of the strangest reasons I’ve heard to dismiss a cleaning lady. His had been working for him for over ten years, was reliable and cleaned very well – a total professional. Once he came home early for a doctor’s appointment, and opened the door only to walk in on a meeting of about fifteen Adventists, bibles in hand. His flat had become their meeting hall; the employee had to go. Cleaning and religion just don’t mix.