As part of my ongoing cleanout of the Lahore house, I hired a Filipina woman yesterday, for two days of intensive cleaning. I generally feel rather conflicted about Pakistanis who employ Filipina maids as I find it exploitative of the maids and unfair to the many, many poor Pakistanis who are not employed, paid those far higher salaries, or are exploited even more. This, however, I rationalised to myself, as the woman is employed elsewhere but was looking for a couple of days of freelance work, and I made sure she had regular breaks and didn’t work the 11 (!) hours she originally suggested.
There’s no doubt that cleaning is not a Pakistani forte, and she has done a good job on the two rooms she tackled yesterday, and is now working on other rooms around the house. It will still not be sparkling, since the house has years grime engrained into every surface, but it will be much nicer than before.
If I lived in Pakistan, I would certainly implement a no-shoes policy, alien though it is to many here. It’s strange though, I feel there are older households where removing shoes was customary especially in carpeted rooms, so I’m not sure how we lost this. My suspicious is that there is an element of class here: servants remove shoes, the masters do not.
In other news: I demonstrated to my father a bluetooth speaker and played one of his favourite songs on it (Tajdar-e-haram by the Sabri brothers) and he has fallen in love. He insisted on going out yesterday, in rush hour, to look at bluetooth speakers in the shops, prior to buying one for himself.