The house help

This is Hawa.

Hawa comes to us once a week to clean our house. She is very reliable, friendly, takes initiative and works really hard. She has lots of experience cleaning for private people and big organisations. We have a real contract with her, for a really good salary, and we even pay her social and health security contributions and transport. She is happy and so are we - at least once a week our house is shining as new, all the sand gone, all the insects banished.

This is not the usual situation of the house help in Tanzania. My colleagues at work complain non stop that their house girls are lazy, not obeying them, stealing things from them. This might be due to the fact that most of them hire teenage girls from the countryside, who desperately need work and want to come to the big city, but should actually be going to school. They have no education and no experience. The ladies pay them peanuts,  a salary not big enough to survive, and they demand work for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. If they are lucky, the girls may negotiate that they are allowed to go to church on Sunday, after they have already cooked lunch. There are no contracts, the girls have no rights. This pretty hard exploitation is a real problem, because it is depriving young girls of education. Of course, most of them would never be able to go to school anyway, since their families cannot afford school fees...

Almost every woman in Dar es Salaam has a house girl, not only my well paid and educated lady colleagues, but also our organisation's lower staff and the cleaning lady. Every woman who works needs a girl at home to take care of her house and help can be gotten for any kind of price. Really.