Maid In Thailand

Most expats in Thailand employ cleaners to come in once or twice a week. Labour is so cheap here compared to the UK that it just makes sense. Why clean your flat yourself when you can get someone to come in and do a better job than you for a few quid a week? At least, that was the idea when we signed up to have the resident maids clean the flat twice a week and change our towels and sheets once weekly. In the fourteen months we have been living in the flat, a plethora of maids have trooped in and out with their mops and buckets. A couple of them left in the high season in search of jobs in the big hotels but most of them have been fired for being, quite frankly, hopeless.

When we first moved in, a two-woman act were in force, cleaning our flat with military efficiency. As soon as they walked in, each knew exactly what they had to do. They had assigned themselves different rooms and would sweep through, leaving not a mite of dust nor a speck of dirt. They got on with the job and cleaned for a good hour between them without faffing or calling up their boyfriend, mum and twenty of their closest friends. Unfortunately, they left after a few months, off to a big, shiny, new hotel. The woman who replaced them had obviously never heard that Thailand is the Land of Smiles. She managed not to crack a smile the entire length of her employment (which was, thankfully, fairly brief). I have never met a grumpier Thai than she. Upon opening the door to her, she would indicate the bucket beside her feet with a brief flick of her eyes and a grunt. I would smile, greet her in Thai and beckon her in. Her expression would not alter from the permanent frown that unattractively pulled down both sides of her face, presumably from decades of grumpiness. In her gloom, even picking her feet off the floor would be too much and so she would shuffle in, ignoring me, and proceed directly to the back bedroom where she would slop a dirty mop around the floor a few times, change the towels and sheets and leave.

The owners of the flats quickly realised that her employment was a mistake (though you would have thought they would have noticed her sullenness when they first met her, unless of course she forced all the cheeriness she allocated herself for the year into that interview) and got rid of her promptly. Her replacement was her antithesis. Bubbly and friendly, she would grant me a huge smile each time she saw me and would ask me, in her gradually improving English (she was trying hard to speak it as often as possible in order to become more fluent), how I was. She was in her mid-twenties and would quietly hum to herself as she worked, occasionally asking me questions about my family, my background or my job. One day, as soon as she walked into the flat, she excitedly burst out, "Emily, Emily, guess what? Guess what?" She had a new boyfriend and wanted to tell me all about him. She used the same opening before telling me about a part-time job she'd been hired to do, working in a restaurant in the evenings. It didn't take much for her to practically burst with excitement. She would laugh and smile and her enthusiasm for life in general was infectious. She was also an expert in the art of towel creations, something she'd learnt in a hotel. A couple of times she came bounding out from the bedroom, saying she wanted to show me something, a grin wide across her face. The first time she had made a rabbit and the second a pair of swans, facing each other as if they were kissing. She was too much of a people person to stay here, working alone, and eventually she too left to work at a hotel at which she would be amongst lots of other hotel workers with whom she could gossip to her heart's content.

When she left, a mother and daughter team stepped in. The daughter looked as if she was thirteen at most so she had probably just left school - in Thailand compulsory, government-funded schooling ends at age twelve. She clearly did not want to be cleaning other people's homes with her mum and I can't say that I blamed her. She followed her mum around with a scowl but, unlike, the grumpy shuffler, she didn't look like the world had defeated her, she merely possessed a healthy adolescent condescension of everything and everyone but her friends. I don't think she really did very much and her mother would regularly berate her for this and that. In fact, I think she spent more time telling her daughter what to do than actually cleaning. As a consequence, our flat was rarely cleaned well. They lasted about three weeks.

The girl that took over from them was only a few years older than the one she replaced, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, and was more interested in ensuring her hair was smooth and falling prettily over her face than mopping a floor and wiping down a table. She dressed in skinny jeans and an assortment of different baby tees and strappy tops, co-ordinating them with beads and jangly bracelets. Hardly appropriate attire for scrubbing and mopping and spraying and wiping. Unsurprisingly, not much of any of that was actually done. Whereas the two women who first cleaned for us spent an hour between them and the bubbly girl would often take a couple of hours before she was finished, this girl was in and out within half an hour (having chatted to her friends on her mobile for probably half of that time), leaving tables and counter tops untouched and the floor only quickly mopped. On the day she left (I scarcely need mention that she was fired and did not leave of her own accord) she brought in a friend to help her who, amazingly, was even worse. She had no idea what she was doing and picked up bottles of cleaning fluid with two fingers, scanning the labels with a bemused expression as if she'd never seen cleaning products in her life before. She insisted on carrying around a tiny handbag across her body which must have dangled irritatingly whenever she bent over to scrub something. Which probably meant she didn't. Most frustrating was when I asked her to change the sheets, pulling them off to illustrate my point. She looked puzzled but nodded her head and said yes. I had to go out and I returned to find that the sheets had not been changed. She hadn't understood a word I had said but, rather than admitting that, she indicated that she had. It's a face-saving device that many Thais adopt and that drives me up the wall.

The two current maids wear loose polo shirts, which I have taken to be a good sign. They know what the job entails, are there to to do it properly, and dress appropriately. The sheets and towels were changed on their first visit which is also a step in the right direction. It remains to be seen whether they will be be fired or will be here for a while!