Postcards from Dakar: Maids

Just a quick note about maids: lots of families here have them, or at least, lots of host families have them. In some families, the maid lives in the house and is there every day, all the time, and in others, the maid comes for the day and goes to her own home at night. The WARC staff told us that lots of live-in maids in particular are women from rural villages who have agreed to work for city families in exchange for food, shelter, and probably some money to send home.

It’s sort of hard for me to figure out what having a maid says about how well off a family is. In the US, if you have a live-in maid, you probably also have a mansion, 7 cars, and a yacht. Here, that is definitely not the case. My family does not have hot water, flushable toilets, a landline telephone, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, stereo, toaster, washer or dryer, refrigerator, microwave, computer, cable, or the Internet. They don’t have nice art or fancy furniture, but they do have a car, a food processor, a five bedroom house, and Tenny.

I don’t really know that much about Tenny (again, that name/spelling is just a guess). She understands some French but only speaks Wolof, so she and I have some trouble communicating. I don’t know where she comes from or where her family lives. My guess is that she’s in her mid-twenties and that she’s not married, or else she’d be living with her husband. She’s Muslim. She wasn’t hired until a week or so after I first arrived, and I suspect that the money my family gets from Wells in order to cover the expense of keeping me plays an important role in keeping her, too.

When we first got here, the WARC staff told us that many of us would likely be living in houses with maids, and that this has been a problem for some of their more socially sensitive students in the past, who have thought that the maids’ work package seemed awfully close to slave labor. They emphasized that no, the maids are not slaves and are free to go whenever they want, but that especially for rural girls, domestic service like this is a pretty good gig. I trust that they know what they’re talking about, and Tenny certainly isn’t abused here or anything, but there are aspects of the situation that make my sense of social justice tingle. Tenny puts in long hours, and although I think a lot of those hours are spent watching TV, the majority of them are spent cooking and cleaning, and there are none of those fancy modern appliances that make housework such a joy these days. My siblings can also be pretty liberal with the criticism sometimes, and have no qualms about telling Tenny that she’s stupid or disrespectful, and a terrible cook (though no one ever leaves any food uneaten and it all seems good to me). They also are perfectly comfortable changing the channel on the TV when Tenny is watching something, whereas they always ask me if I’m watching whatever is on, even if its all in Wolof and there’s no way I could be following what’s going on. I’ve also never seen her get paid, although that’s not necessarily a transaction that I would expect to happen right in front of me.

All that said, there are times when it seems like Tenny is part of the family like Fatima or Moussouba. She always eats with us, and she laughs and jokes with everyone much more often than she gets reprimanded for doing something wrong. The kids all do decent portion of the housework, too. Everyone will do some of their own laundry during the week as they have need, though someone comes every week or two to do the bulk of it at once. Everyone picks up after themselves, too. Mom, if the Sagna family lived in our house, the kitchen counter would always be spotless and there would never be socks or newspapers all over the den (the fact that no one reads the newspaper or wears socks might have something to do with this). Everyone knows how to cook, too, and Moussouba and Kiki sometimes help to make meals or just do the whole thing themselves. It’s true that my host mom is sort of imperious with Tenny, but she’s kind of like that with all the kids too.