Living with a staff

It's taken some learning and adjustment to having a personal staff. First, what do you call them? Some people refer to their staff as "servants" but that just feels wrong.

We have a driver, Ramesh,

plus a couple who lives next door and takes care of our house: Lakshmi cleans

and Sekar does yard work and maintains the house.

We are still getting used to asking them to do stuff for us. It's straightforward enough to tell the caretaker we have a leaky faucet. It's sort of like talking to a landlord. But it feels weird to tell the maid, "Please scrub the baseboards" or to leave the driver waiting outside in the hot sun while we have drinks in a cool restaurant.

But it is really hard to do business here and they know how to get things done. We struggled at first trying to do things ourselves. But we were advised to let our driver take care of matters. We've had him drop off and pick up our laundry, and he bought curtain rods for me last week. But I haven't gotten to asking him to buy our groceries yet, as many people do here. 

There is always something broken in the house for the caretaker to manage: leaky faucets, the doorbell caught fire day one, a light fell off the wall spontaneously. How would we know who to call to get these things fixed? Plus he has warned us to never leave any works unattended in our house so it helps to have him here to watch them.

We don't go nuts with the maid- she works 4 hours each week day. She washes the dishes so that makes up for not having a dishwasher. But it does not suck to have the bed made and the floors cleaned every week day.


When we returned from Kuala Lumpur and arrived at the crazy-busy airport it was great to see our driver smiling and waiting for us. He brought the car around so we didn't have to trudge through the parking lot. When we got home the caretaker was at our house. While we were gone he had slept on the floor in front of our door to keep an eye on the house, and he and his wife had taken care of the cats when we were gone. Then yesterday morning they brought over some food they'd made and it was great.

We fell in to this situation pretty easily. Our driver was suggested by another employee who went back to the US right after I arrived. And the caretaker and his wife live next door and are employees of the man who owns our house. So we don't have to do any hiring or firing, which seems to be common among the other expats here.

All in all, while it's a necessity to have this help, it's also pretty darned nice!