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When you have a joke of a house girl running your house

Living

This week I was reminded to always seek to know both sides to a story before I make any judgements. It all began when I hired a lady to do laundry at my house twice a week.

The relationship was born of necessity on both our parts: On the one hand, I am trying to maintain the expensive weekly manicure my husband pays for, so I cannot be subjecting myself to harsh detergents on a daily basis. She, on the other hand, is illiterate, has three children to look after and a husband who moved out and left her last year.

I was not particularly impressed by her, but when she told me the father of her children had walked out on her, I hired her on the spot. After all, #MenAreTrash.

Shamim was hired to wash clothes on one day of the week, and iron them on the next, with one extra day thrown in to mitigate any effects of unexpected rain or power cuts.

What have you done for the first time lately?

Instead, she somehow manages to come every day of the week and spend one day washing badly, the next day ironing half the clothes and rewashing the ones I have returned to her, and three days ironing a half of the remaining half of the clothes, which means I always have some washing and ironing left to do on Sunday.

Shamim declared war on all buttons. I have replaced more dress and shirt buttons in her reign of terror than in the entire childhood of all my children put together.

If I dress up in a hurry and rush into an early morning meeting, I'll invariably find that one of my breasts is out greeting the General Manager! Shamim has somehow managed to kill two buttons off my blouse with one wash. Whenever I make up my mind to fire her, I remember her three fatherless kids.

Shamim also has different ideas about cleanliness and hygiene from me. For example, when she washes the children's shoes and baba watoto's boots, she never cleans the bottom.

When I asked why there was a garden of soil collecting under our shoes and by extension in the shoe rack, her logic was: why clean the bottom of a shoe when it is just going to be used on the floor again?

This logic extends to all mops and floor rugs. She does not wash them because they are going to be in contact with the dirty floor, anyway. Somehow from a cleaning contract, Shamim made her way into the kitchen, and frequently has lunch ready when I take the children home.

I do not remember asking her to offer her services, especially not when she cooks so badly, but as an employer I am trying not to punish initiative. My children have nicknamed her meals 'lake of beans', because it is a bowl of brown water with a few canoes of beans trying to escape the perilous floods!

All her meals follow a similar pattern, and she cooks too much that she always ends up having leftovers to carry home. Let me not talk about the glassware she has been breaking all over.

So here I was, with a washerwoman who cannot make clothes clean, never finishes ironing, cannot cook to save her life and is constantly shopping food out of my kitchen.

And all in the name of supporting her against the 'trash of a man' who left her behind. Today, as I prepare Shamim's severance package, I'm thinking that perhaps the man who ran away may have a compelling story to tell about his challenges. All I know is I need to listen to both sides of a story more often.

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