This woman is doing her job, cleaning windows. She has a sad, distracted look as though her mind were far away on personal problems elsewhere, and it probably is; but you will never know what she’s thinking.
She’s a “helper”, as they say here; a combination maid, cook, nanny and laundress. Every family here with any education and income at all has at least one helper- and many families have more. Helpers are part of the basic local social structure.
They come from remote barangays, or from small towns up in the mountains above the city. They’re hired informally, by word of mouth.
There’s no formal contract between you and a new helper -just a brief discussion as to what their duties will be and what you will pay, usually not much; but then they don’t expect much.
If you don’t like their work, you can fire them; if they don’t like you, they can disappear without warning. It’s a relationship that may last for a week, or for many years. For those who, like me, come from a “First World” country, it’s a very strange relationship indeed.
In Europe and America, most people have machines to do their daily chores. But here, there’s a person to do these things for you, and your relationship to that person is one of extreme intimacy, and extreme distance at the same time.
Here’s someone who lives in your house, who can’t help but know the most intimate details of your private life, someone who washes your underwear and cooks your food every day. In America, only your parents, or your spouse, would ever be allowed to get that close to you.
And yet your helper is not even your friend. You have only limited responsibility for her, and there are social boundaries between you that can’t be crossed. It’s how the world works here. You can only accept it, and be thankful that people are willing work so close to you for so little.
You can, if you wish, treat your helper as a kind of machine, a robot, and many people do; they spend a lot of time complaining when this “robot” does not perform as expected.
But look again at this woman washing your windows, washing your clothes, cooking your food: and always remember that she knows you, for better or worse, much more than you will ever know her.