Women’s Cruelty to House Helps

  

Women’s Cruelty to House Helps

House helps are a set of people that is very useful to the society. They relieve people especially working class women of a lot of burden by helping out with house chores. Running the house and going to work can be very stressful for women to undertake all by themselves. Women who have to report at work as early as 8 o’clock in the morning cannot afford to spend much time doing house chores before leaving home, and by the time they return, they are often too tired to do the chores. Aside from cooking, women have to do the dishes, sweep the whole house, clean dusty furniture, fetch water where the taps are not running, do the laundries, take care of the children if they are still young, go to the market and generally run their homes. If the children are grown ups, they often join hands with their mothers to do the house chores, but if they are still small, they cannot offer the help that their mothers need. In fact, they themselves constitute full time jobs to their mothers. In addition, nursing mothers who are working must feed, bath and dress up their babies, and also drop them at the day care centres before going to work daily where there are no nannies to leave them with. As a result of all these commitments, every woman desires to have someone who would help out with the loads of work in the house on daily basis. House helps are, therefore, handy in this regard.

They undertake much of the chores and take a lot of stress off the woman. Indeed, house helps are an important part of the family system. They prevent the women from being overworked, thereby keeping sane and generally healthy to enjoy their marital lives. Moreover, women who are saddled with too much work at the home front cannot put in their best in their workplaces. They are often tired by the time they get to work, and they easily doze off on their seats because they have to wake up very early every day to take care of the house before going to work to avoid lateness. In the alternative, they sleep late after doing the house chores late into the night. So, when they wake up in the morning, they feel tensed up for lack of adequate sleep, and head for work with headaches and weakness of the body. Such women’s productivity is usually very low because it’s hard to think clearly in that condition. They may end up losing their jobs and their contribution to the family upkeep would be terminated. The house helps, therefore, contribute in no small measure to the nation’s socio-economic development by helping to enhance productivity of female workers, prevent increase in unemployment rate and sustain the standard of living of working class families.

However, though virtually all women would agree that housemaids are very useful in the homes, not many know how to accord them the kind of treatment they deserve. A lot of women see housemaids as slaves, who must be used and even over-used. Just because they pay for the services of those girls, boys and women, they think they own them and so, ensure that they are overworked to get the right value for their money. Many actually treat their servants as though they were not human beings like themselves, made by the same God who created them. They could give their children good food to eat, and toss whatever they like to the servants. They also make their maids sleep on mats, while their children sleep on mattresses. Such women see their maids as outcasts since they are not their own children, and treat them as second class citizens. And many employers of maids can be very fastidious, condemning everything their maids do and beating them up at the slightest opportunity. Some even injure their maids for breaking plates or doing anything which offended them. They lose their tempers easily no matter how hard the maids try to please them, and mete out cruel punishments to them. Such punishments often include starving them of food, and inflicting wounds on their bodies.

This inhumanity of man to man commonly takes place between some privileged women and their domestic servants, and the ugly phenomenon occurs everywhere in the world. Here in Nigeria, there have been reports of some people stabbing their maids with knives, putting pepper in their eyes or private parts, and even pressing their backs with hot irons!

A pastor’s wife in Jos is known by her church members for treating her house helps with disdain. According to them, she would serve her children fried rice and chicken and give her houseboys (who are also members of their church) beans and garri to eat. The day she decides to give the house helps chicken, she would give them the head, neck and legs, while her children would be given the thighs and other fleshy parts. And these are the people doing all the house chores for her. Mind you, that family is not poor. They can afford to take good care of those domestic servants. It is just wickedness at work.

A maid was reportedly stabbed to death with a knife in Abuja recently, while another domestic servant was stabbed almost to a point of death by a member of a very influential family also in Abuja.

Few years ago, there was a shocking report of a gruesome treatment a Sri Lankan maid received in the hands of her employers in Saudi Arabia. The 49-year-old maid, Ariyawathi, had complained of being overworked as according to her, she was not allowed to even rest; but rather than reduce her workload, her employers did the most unimaginable thing to her. They hammered 24 nails and needles into different parts of her body, and sent her back to her country! Ariyawathi had left her country in search of greener pasture in Saudi Arabia and was engaged by that family as a maid. After working hard without rest for about five months, she complained to her employers one day about her heavy workload, apparently thinking they would pity her and consider reducing her work. But they got infuriated and decided to torture her by driving nails and needles into her body before sending her back home. She actually said that the woman heated up the nails before her husband planted them into her body! And as for her salary, they paid her for only two months and told her that they were withholding the remaining to buy an air ticket to send her home!

She returned to her country in severe pains and was hospitalised the next day. The hospital took X-rays of her which revealed that she had 24 nails and needles in her body. The length of the nails ranged from 2.5 to 5cm (one to two inches), while the needles were about 2.5cm. The doctors promptly scheduled a surgery during which 13 nails and 5 needles were removed from her legs and forehead. It was a miracle that she survived the ordeal. Dr. Keerthi Satharasinghe of Kamburupitiya Hospital, located 160 kilometres from the Sri Lankan capital, Colombo, said after the three-hour procedure, that there were six more needles in her hand but they could not be removed because the surgery might damage her nerves and arteries. He, however, assured that they would not be harmful to her.

Commenting on the incident, Sri Lanka’s Foreign Employment Bureau said Ariyawathi had been too afraid to report the matter to Saudi authorities, saying that she feared that her employers might not allow her to return home. The country’s Deputy Minister of Economic Development then, Lakshman Yapa Abeywardena, said his government would report the case to the Saudi government, promising that the government would provide Ariyawathi with compensation.

It is very unfortunate that house helps are so valuable; yet, they are so despised and not appreciated by those they work for. To mete out such gruesome treatments as the ones mentioned above to house helps is not only barbaric but also callous of those employers. Women should see maids and houseboys as the helps that they are and treat them as such. They should treat them with kindness and show them love, just as though they were their own children. There is nothing wrong in giving house helps the same kinds of food the family members eat, buying them good clothes to put on, and giving them a sense of belonging in the family. You never know where your children will find themselves tomorrow and no one will be there to show them kindness if you do not know how to show kindness to other people’s children. Many children (or people) are suffering today for sins that their parents committed. So, we must fear God in our actions and beware of what we do to others, for, wicked acts have a way of backfiring on perpetrators. As the saying goes, what goes round comes around.

Pastor Tunde Bakare of the Latter Rain Assembly, Lagos, and co-founder, Save Nigeria Group, once told a story of his own life during a church programme in Jos. He used to wash clothes for a wealthy family on designated days when he was growing up, because his family was very poor. This family normally cooked meals for their dog that were different from the ones they ate. After preparing their own meals, they would prepare less palatable ones for their dog, sometimes a potpourri of leftover meals. So, whenever Pastor Bakare, whom they nicknamed ‘Wash’, came around, they would serve him food from the one they prepared for their dog, and call out to him: “Wash, come and take your food”. They couldn’t imagine Wash, a mere washer-boy, eating the same kind of food they were eating. But years later, the tables were turned against them. The denigrated Wash became rich and by the time he met that family again, he discovered that they had become wretched. He forgave them and decided to help them. He began to pay their children’s school fees, and even sponsored one of them abroad for further studies. This is a great lesson to us all. You can never tell what that house help you are looking down on and being wicked to will become tomorrow. That you are rich today does not guarantee you lifetime riches. Anything can happen in this life. You may find yourself needing the help of your house help tomorrow. And not everyone can forgive the way Pastor Bakare did.

Even though some housemaids have caused their female employers to regret taking them in by having affairs with their spouses or even getting pregnant for them, such cases are often caused by the men who harass the maids for sex, and the timid maids, for fear of losing their jobs give in to such amorous demands. All maids should, therefore, not be punished for the sins of a few. If the men can overcome the temptation of infidelity, maids generally don’t have the guts to seduce their madams’ husbands. Employers of house helps must learn to be patient with them and eschew wickedness in their dealings with them, treating them as they would their own children. House helps should be seen as people who are playing complementary roles with the women to make their lives comfortable.

By Mrs. Nike Oluwole