Helena

I was the last member of the intern house to arrive to Liberia.  By then, the arrangements for our laundry, cooking, and cleaning had already been made.   Sepah, who lives a couple doors down, would do our laundry for $10 per person per month.  Helena, who lives clear across town, would do our cooking three nights a week for $15 per person per month (not including the food itself) and another $35 per person per month for cleaning the house twice a week.

I opted out of the food (have I not yet posted on my inability to stomach Liberian food?) but wasn’t thrilled about the high relative to price of the cleaning.  $15 to cook but $35 to clean?  $35 x 7 = $245 per month to clean twice a week.  It felt like way too much. Momar’s mom in Senegal pays $60-$80 per month for a girl to live there and cook and clean every day.  It seemed like we must have been overpaying Helena by a factor of at least three.

Generally speaking I just let these things slide, because at the end of the day another $10 to me is nothing compared to what it is to the receiver.  But Helena wasn’t even doing a good job cleaning (you can’t walk across the house without needing to clean your feet before getting into bed).  It was never clear that she even came.

Meanwhile, Sepah arrived dutifully at our door every day, and spent hours washing our clothes by hand in the windows of sunshine or at least dryness between the downpours.  She was without doubt working significantly harder than Helena for significantly less.  Helena’s hourly wage must have been 8x Sepah’s.  It didn’t feel right.

Meanwhile, Helena asked for July’s pay in advance because she was moving into a new house and they needed the entire year’s rent at once (this is actually standard practice here… crazy!).  So one month working for us paid her rent for a year.

Two weeks ago we decided to let Helena go.  The going rate in Liberia is $60 a month, not $250.  We were getting ripped off, which might have been fine if we were happy with her work.  We decided we'd rather pay Sepah $60 to clean the house, who lived right next door and was always thre anyway. We called and called Helena for days to tell her but she never answered her phone.  Finally last week she arrived in the morning before we left and we broke the news.

In tears, Helena asked our guards to reason with us.  Personally I wasn’t very sympathetic.  When I told Achie how much we’d been paying her, he was shocked.  Helena got a sweet deal.  She got paid for two months of work the equivalent of 8 months of pay, and made enough to cover rent for two years. When I explained our reasoning, he agreed our decision was more than fair.

Helena returned to the house again this morning in tears.  Maybe she’d been counting on the extra money and already spent it.  Ultimately we decided to rehire her for $60 per month.

It’s a fine line.  While I’m comfortable paying a small “rich white person” tax, it’s not ok to rip me off egregiously.  I hear so many calls lately from the African development community to treat Africans with the respect and dignity they deserve.  Treat them as partners and not charity cases. 

They are right.  And following that logic, we were right to take a stand against Helena charging us 4x what she should have and not doing her job well.  Doing anything less would have been charity