Empty Staff Quarters

I do not work on Mondays; I do some lesson plans, I walk my dog, I read, I write, I go to my tennis lesson at 5.

I do not cook; Moise, a Togolese man in his 50's with three daughters, spends 2 full days a week at our house making enough food so that I never have to boil water if I don't want to. We pay him the generous salary, by Togolese standards, of 7,000 CFA ($14) per day.

I do not clean; Clara, a Ghanaian woman in her 50's with four children, spends 1 day a week here doing laundry, scrubbing our floors, vacuuming, etc. Aside from some dishes on the days when Clara or Moise aren't here and organizing of stuff, I am spared household duties for the price of 7,000 CFA as well.

Despite this ridiculous luxury by our standards, many locals think it's strange that we don't have full time staff. But I feel lazy and guilty by American standards for having said cook, cleaner and all around easy life as much as I do.

So imagine the conflicting emotions that arose last week when Clara broke down into tears about how much she is struggling right now. Her husband died years ago and her nearly grown children can't find jobs as there are so few in Togo. She only works one day a week right now because there aren't any US Embassy families who need her. We keep telling her that we'll recommend her to arriving families, but we can't make any promises.

She is living on $14 a week (sadly, still more than the average Togolese makes) and is struggling. As she cried, I became privy to a family drama that I still don't fully understand. It went like this:

"I wish I hadn't been born African. Africans have black hair, which means they have black minds," said Clara after telling me she needed to leave early to attend a court hearing about some land issues.

"There are bad people everywhere, Clara. It's not just here." I responded, taken aback by her comment.

She looked genuinely surprised. "Really Madame? There are?"

She went on to describe how her late husband's brother had been managing her money because that's how finances pass when a man dies. It doesn't go to his wife - it goes to another man. Her son wasn't yet old enough to be put on their accounts and properties as the owner, so it all went to her brother-in-law.

This man used his dead brother's money to buy a house for his family, instead of leaving it for Clara's kids' education. But this detail came after learning about her present problem. He had recently come to Togo to visit some land that Clara's husband had purchased with 2 other men. According to Clara, he put a "joojoo" spell on the land that would make it so that she would drop dead if she ever stepped foot there. He then asked her to meet him there and discuss its "true" ownership.

She refused to meet him there and was going with some of her friends to meet him at a court house to discuss the land deed. Her brother-in-law was claiming that Clara forged her husband's signature on ownership documents and somehow or another it was actually his money that purchased the land.

This is where I started getting lost in the family drama. Clara's Ghanaian English combined with all of the intricate voodoo references and incomprehensible legal structure (or lack thereof) made things very confusing very fast.

But all I know is that I had an older woman in my kitchen with tears rolling down her cheeks, desperately wanting to ask for more work to help her through this tough time. I know because I was avoiding the question.

We recently gave our cook a huge advance on his pay so that he could cover her tuition. He's paying us back over 6 months. Our gardener (yeah, we have one of those too - it's not normal, I know) was only just recently able to move out of his sister's shack because he's working 6 days a week (shared between 3 houses) on $6 a day, all the while paying for his little brother to go to school.

So where does the help begin and end, in a country where everywhere you look are people in desperate need? How can you be sure that your money will do any good at the end of the day when the family structures and cultural differences are so foreign?

And how can you reconcile suddenly being in a place where you're richer than most locals' wildest dreams, when you come from a place where you're most certainly not?

Most of us were raised on a certain moral code that taught us not to pay for things just because you can. We admire people who can live in mansions but chose not to. We respect those who can afford a full time chef but enjoy cooking for themselves anyway. Just because you can pay for a bell-hop doesn't mean you can't carry your own friggin' luggage.

More than anything though, most of us never have to make the above decisions. Life in the US is simply too expensive, and even when it's not, we all find ways of needing or wanting more and more things that make it so in the end.

But it's not like that here. People with money hire staff. Doing something yourself takes away a job from someone who needs it. People with staff quarters fill them. Leaving them empty deprives someone of a clean, dry room in a malaria and flood ridden land.

I don't need someone cleaning my house two times a week - it'd be absurd - but I can. Does that mean I should?

Joey and I have discussed possibly giving Clara an old sewing machine to help her start another revenue source, or trying to cover some of her younger kids' schooling. We'd hoped to wait a few more months to get to know her better. Mostly we just feel incredibly awkward about the whole thing.

And I can't even begin to process the implications of an African woman telling an American woman that her people are inherently bad and that she wishes she'd been born something else.