In other words: it’s clean-up time.
Mélanie has taken on the role of the "hunter" in our cleaning relationship, hunting down any spills, stains, dirt, or trails of ants and pulverizing them. My role, in contrast, has been that of the "gatherer."
My job duties include gathering up the vast CD collection I discovered in Claudia’s room. I’ve spent many free hours burning the mix of West African albums onto my computer, and have left the likes of “Mamou Sidibé” and “Ali Farka Touré” hanging out on the coffee table together. That just will not do.
The family’s collection of games must also be gathered and put in its correct corner of the house. Once Claudia’s two sons Abraham and Andrew get back, the gaming will recommence, but me and Mélanie can no longer keep our Jenga pieces splayed on the kitchen table (usually the evidence of the previous night’s slaughter of Liz McGehee). No, the table must now be properly set for real family life.
Finally, and most importantly, I must gather all of our clean laundry that has been strategically draped over every inch of free space on the chairs, couch, TV, book shelves, even fans. Everywhere you look, you can see a pair of my multi-colored undies from the 'ole faithful Fruit-of-the-Loom multipacks (my Tulane volleyball team still gives me crap about these).
The reason we have all of our "sous-vêtements"/"under-clothing" hanging around is because we are at the heart of the rainy season. Without a dryer, and with the rain preventing us from hanging up our clothes outside, we lay our clothes around the house.
Recently, my colleague and former roommate Bremen had his computer charger stolen during his vacation in Morocco. We have been sharing my Mac charger this past week, and he prefers working over here at Claudia's house rather than make the trek to my Keneya Ciwara office on the other side of town.
Working from home has been great -- wearing pajamas and having the option of sitting outside by the pool -- but there is the problem of our clothes-drying. Bremen has had the displeasure of running into our damp clothes around the house. He has been ever-surrounded by my drying, clean laundry.
And in return, I have been bombarded by his dirty.
Ever since I’ve been here in Bamako, Bremen has struggled with the woman who cleans his house, Caddy. Despite his rigorous nightly studies, Bremen does not have a full grasp on the French language, so there’s a language barrier with Caddy. On top of that, however, there’s the body language barrier: Caddy is unbelievably unpleasant, and shows it with every inch of her being.
I had the opportunity to experience her "mauvaise disposition"/"bad disposition" when I lived at Bremen’s my first month here. Even without the language barrier in my case, she will not greet you, she does not try to uphold conversation, and she never smiles. She seems aggravated at any and everyone’s presence, but most of all Bremen’s.
Now besides his lack of knowledge of the French language, the only problem I can think of when it comes to Bremen is an over-addiction to peanut M&Ms. Bremen cannot find this candy in Bamako, which sometimes makes him sad, and when he's sad he plays the same songs over and over again on the piano. Really not much too much to complain about there.
"Bremen: l'Agrèable"
who likes taking photographs of nature and feeding turtles
Bremen is the nicest person you could work for; he's a hard-working BYU grad that collects postcards with inspirational quotes. Bremen is also the cleanest person you could tidy house for; he really only eats salads in addition to his peanut M&Ms (when he can find them). He thus leaves little to no dish clean-up, and makes bathroom clean-up a cinch when he washes off in the pool after his hour to two hour runs.
So why hate the guy?
Because he’s too clean.
Bremen actually cleans up after himself...can you imagine that? Caddy can’t. She was astonished when he cut her days to 3 instead of 6, and refused to accept the proposition for her to come at 9AM instead of 7AM, which would give him time to cook breakfast and clean up after himself before she came. She’s been able to keep herself preoccupied despite the little work Bremen leaves her with; one day he came home to a whole rack of freshly cleaned and polished shoes.
Bremen is SO clean, in fact, that he recently decided he doesn’t need a maid at all. He was finally answering to the voice inside of his head that said, “you’re still in your twenty-somethings, what are you doing with a maid?!”
But there’s this tricky flip side here in Mali. The more people you have working at your house, the more people you give jobs to, and the more you’re able to share your tubab wealth to the local population. It wasn’t an easy decision to let Caddy go, and Bremen was hoping to keep it on the down low. Not to mention all of his Malian colleagues would think he was crazy for wanting to do is own house chores.
He broke the news to Caddy, but cher Caddy wasn’t having it. Bremen gave her two weeks’ pay as a parting give, and yet little miss Caddy was still P.O.-ed. She called up Bremen’s co-worker Kankou, saying she was only given two weeks rather than a month’s notice; she phoned Bremen’s co-worker Lassana, citing all of the duties she's performed correctly, including meticulous shoe washing; she whipped out her very vague contract put together on a whim by her previous patron and pointed out to all of the other employees in Bremen's small neighborhood that there was no end date. Her unpleasantness had reached a new level.
"Caddy: la Désagréable"
our wicked foil who can still wicked clean some sheets
That’s where I get dragged into the whole shebang. As previously mentioned, Bremen has been over at the house using my Mac charger, and both of our offices know that we’ve been working together the past week. I get a phone call from Lassana, the office’s head of finances, who says he needs to talk to Bremen about his predicament. When I tell him I’m going to pass the phone to Bremen, he says, "Non, non, Liza; Bremen n’est pas encore francophone. Est-ce que tu peut traduire?"/"No, no, Lee-zuh; Bremen is not yet a French-speaker. Can you translate?"
So translate I did: Caddy wanted to file a complaint against Bremen with the Bureau of Labor. There we all were, right smack in the middle of squeaky clean Bremen’s dirty laundry.
Despite all efforts to keep it civil, and quiet, now everyone was talking about Bremen and Caddy’s tiff. "Avez-vous entendu? Bremen veux se laver son propre maison!"/"Have ya’ll heard? Bremen wants to clean his own house!"
With the threat of a government sanction because of a poorly-written contract he had no part in creating, our good guy Bremen is seeking out other options. He's biting the bullet and will try to keep Caddy on in some capacity. Perhaps if Caddy actually sticks to the later hour of 9AM, avoiding direct contact so that she doesn't bring down his day with her negativity, Bremen can probably live with having his shoes cleaned regularly.
And as for the comments around the office -- well, I’m sure Bremen would much prefer his colleagues being exposed to a house full of damp boxers than the reality of his house's dramatic, and personal, employee conflicts.
No comments:
Post a Comment