Sunday, March 29, 2009

Domestically Help-less

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It is official.

We are maidless. Erm. Again. What a sense of déjà vu! We sent our domestic helper Mun back today. Hence, the title of my blog entry. Domestically helpless. In every sense of the word.

I washed an entire load of baby clothes, wrung them, hung them out to dry, cooked porridge, peeled grapes, fed baby, cleaned up, wiped off, picked up, dried off… and that is just TODAY! So, it is in times like this, that an extra pair of hands was very much appreciated!

Why did it come to this state?

Well, while Mun was quite a good help in most areas, she had one area I could not stand. She had the tendency to tell lies and we caught her lying on three different occasions. Last night, my younger sister found a Nokia handphone left charging in her room, partially hidden beneath the cupboards. Mun was in the room when this discovery was made, and instead of owning up, she claimed the phone belonged to my sister’s maid. Strangely, she unplugged the phone out from the wall charger and took it away. But not before my sister looked into the SMS Inbox and saw several messages written in Indonesian.

Early this morning, when we learnt of this, Nic asked Mun to surrender the phone. And when I saw it, I realised that the phone belonged to ME. It was an old Nokia phone that I thought was misplaced long ago! All the SMSes were already deleted. Once again, she claimed the phone did not belong to her, and so we decided to leave it at that, till we could verify with my sister’s maid on Monday.

Around 10 a.m., my house phone rang, and a guy asked for Mun, speaking in Indonesian. When we asked Mun, she once again denied, and insisted the caller was my sister’s maid’s boyfriend (even though my sister never comes by over the weekend, so there’s no reason why anyone should be calling at 10 a.m. in the morning).

But before we could ask more, she spoke up and asked to return back to Indonesia.

And so we did. We called the maid agency, and sent her back this afternoon.

Well, this is the third maid we’ve sent back. And it really doesn’t get easier. While my heart goes out to them, to have to leave their families behind and come to a foreign and literally entrust their lives with total strangers, it is also hard for us to welcome a total stranger into our homes. Mun was with us for almost 10 months, and she was “family,” in a sense. While Nic says I am getting too personal about this, I cannot deny a real sense of sadness that things had to come to this state. I guess there are many things I can “close an eye” to, but when it comes to integrity, this is something important to me! She takes care of my baby! I don’t want any “transference” of negative values. And the fact was, this was not the only incident that occurred to show her propensity to lie.

Ah well, we asked for a replacement maid, and she will be coming in about 2 weeks’. Pray for us! Haha!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Ummm...wait...I'm confused. Why do you need a live in maid?

Unknown said...

Hi Yaya, I hired a live-in maid to take care of my housework and baby, cos I'm working. :)