Fatim

We have caved in and hired a maid. Our friends have been suggesting it for a while, casting what they imagined to be subtle aspersions on my housekeeping ability. We actually had no intention of taking on a maid, but on Friday as we were talking with increasing dread of the “big clean” we were planning on doing the next day, one more or less came to us. Robert came back upstairs from getting the energy company people to turn our water on at least until after the fête (the rest of that bill has apparently still not been paid and our apartment manager/nemesis Touré has gone on the pilgrimage to Mecca and is therefore unreachable) to ask us if we would consider taking on the maid he had just found on the stairs.

To explain: as far as we know, Fatim's story goes like this. She was working for and living with the Nigerians who live down the street for about 20 days when she washed two bowls that belonged to someone else. Her employers then threw her and all of her possessions out, giving her 1000 CFA (a little over 2 dollars) for her trouble. Her parents live in a village on the outskirts of Bamako and she needed to find more work, so she came to sleep in the stairwell of our building.

Maids in Bamako have it notoriously rough. They are almost all illiterate girls from poor village families who are entirely dependent on the families they work for for food, shelter, protection, etc. Sexual assault is a huge problem, and (given the fact most Malians think all Nigerians are scum), our friends seem pretty certain this is what happened to Fatim.

We decided to hire her to come clean our apartment (minus our bedroom) on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings. She did a wonderful job on Friday and she is very nice. I am surprised at how uncomfortable I find it being a white expat in Africa with local house help with whom we can have only limited communication. There is just a whole lot of historical baggage that goes with the situation that you can't really shake out. There is also the problem that Fatim is still sleeping on our stairs. She doesn't sleep there at night (I don't know what she does at night), but every morning she must come in when our neighbors open the downstairs door and she spreads out her blanket and sleeps. This makes me uncomfortable, mostly because I want to know that she has somewhere safe to sleep at night, but I don't know how to address the issue. We didn't hire her as a live-in maid and the way our locks work there isn't a safe way for her to sleep on our porch without giving her keys, which would be a bad idea. However, when I explained this to our friends they said “You can always fire her and get another maid.” I like Fatim, and I would like to think that we can provide her with a little money for relatively easy work without any threat of harassment, however she can't keep sleeping in our stairwell. On the other hand, I really don't want to kick her out without being sure she has somewhere to go.

Robert said today he would ask her if she wants to work for his family in Niamakoro part-time and sleep there where she could share a room with his younger sister. I really hope she takes him up on the offer.