No, You Can’t have It All

One year later...

The other day my son discovered his wiggy. You should have seen his face. One minute he was flailing around yelling his head off while I tried to change his diaper (he is very possessive of his poo) and the next his hand connected with his penis and bingo! Silence.

A look of pleasurable awe stole over his face and I thought – not without a tiny twinge of envy – here goes a lifetime of unconscious patting, surreptitious fixing, and comforting tugging. And he wasn’t yet one year old. Watching this grand discovery I was given, as Agatha Christie’s Belgian detective would say, “furiously to think”. What great discoveries have I made after one year in Peru?

I was dismayed to discover that I could come up with nothing earthshaking and was in fact unable to write a single line. I had Blogger’s Block. Drastic action was needed.

After a year of culture shock, the first half spent as a stay-at-home new mother and the second adjusting to becoming a school teacher, I felt I deserved to re-live the old days. While not wishing to belittle the Peruvian experience I suppose I felt it would be nice to get back into my comfort zone and reclaim my identity. In Peru I am, to my great shock, a gringa. It is a term I thought was used by Latinos to refer exclusively to non-Latino Americans but it appears that it means any English speaking non-Peruvian.

And the most that people here seem to be able to identify about me is that I am non-Peruvian.

It’s bad enough having spent years explaining to people in Europe that Trinidad is not a neighbourhood in Jamaica, but here they keep asking me what part of Central America it is or to whom it “belongs”.

Like the cheesy Cheers song goes, sometimes you want to go where everybody knows your name.

So, using air miles tickets accumulated during my former life as a hard-travelling diplomat, I set off in mid-October with my two offspring in tow. Ah, I thought, a civilized 10 days in the brisk autumnal air of London. I’ll take the children sightseeing; meet up with similarly accessorized friends. We’d sit around in their back gardens sipping (alright, guzzling) fizzy white wine and gossiping while the kids frolicked at our feet. I would pay a visit to my former office, show off the sprogs, have a productive meeting with my former boss and discuss the state of world affairs rather than the best way to serve ceviche. I might even squeeze in a naughty night out. Ah, the conveniences and culture of the first world!

I was of course, severely deluded. My heroic friend and her stoic husband had offered to accommodate us in their small north London house. Already in possession of three children between 6 years and 1 month and an aged and enigmatic cat, this was nothing short of insanity. But, we thought, between two intelligent, professional women we could handle the lot of them.

On average, what with diaper changes, bathroom rotation, breastfeeding and the Baby Inca’s obsession with trying to sample the cat’s food, it would take us about 4 hours just to get ready to leave the house each day. Packing all the kids, two strollers and diaper bags into my friend’s newly acquired people carrier left room for little more than a small slip of paper and, like a chinese puzzle, once unpacked it was almost impossible to reassemble. Rather than sitting around in the backyard in the late October air discussing the state of the Commonwealth and how the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition is making out, we were reduced to furtive sips of wine in the kitchen late at night while loading the dishwasher and discussing the difficulty of finding affordable childcare in the metropolis. First reality check.

Paying for my principles

The first time I went to Lima I was shocked at the spectacle of domestic employees in uniforms trailing after their employers in every restaurant, supermarket and shopping mall. My husband took us to the well-heeled suburb of Asia Beach one day. It is the closest thing to a beach that Lima has: traditional sandy expanses lapped by the waves of the freezing Humboldt Current. The well-to-do own beach houses and dedicated ice cream sellers who refuse to sell to non-residents. The families sat about under beach umbrellas while three or four servants in blue or white tunics waited on them hand and foot, scuttling endlessly in and out of the houses because there is a strict ban against “domestics” sitting on or swimming from the beach. In restaurants nannies are not allowed to sit at the same table as their employers.

Terrible, I though. I was particularly offended by the colour-coded tunics which I felt were unnecessary trapping of class division. No Peruvian understood why I was so bothered. “But Señora, they like it, it gives them status; and they don’t have to wear out their own clothes.” And the separate seating accommodations? “They prefer to sit apart, they’d be embarrassed to have to interact with their employer’s social circle”.

When I took Smuggies to a friend’s birthday party we were greeted at the door by a gardener/handyman, who called a maid, who in turn called the nanny, who ushered Smuggs into the house. On returning to pick her up I waited in the foyer watched by various other employees peeping at me from various doors. At no time did I actually meet a parent. They had hired a hotdog stand and all the entertainment. At Smuggies’ birthday party one girl informed me that it was quite all right if she decided to stay later because her chauffeur was waiting outside for her.

I was horrified and swore that I would take great care to ensure that my daughter would never believe that this was real life.

Upon relocating I did realise that I would have to get someone to help me with the baby and the apartment, particularly once I found a job. The gringa network issued dire warnings not to use employment agencies to find domestic help and stressed the importance of getting someone de confianza. I found a lovely lady who had worked for the last 10 years for extranjeros and came highly recommended.

As a Lima greenhorn I happily paid her a gringa salary from my gringa savings and considered myself lucky to have her. With the high-minded idiocy of the morally righteous, I based all my decisions on what my employee told me her former boss had done. Señora Ann always paid all the medical expenses, both for her employee and her three children. Señora Ann paid for the private school which her employee’s daughter attended. Señora Ann paid a day's wages worth of overtime for an evening's babysitting. Señora Ann had several employees: gardener, handyman, cook, housekeeper and nanny. Señora Ann, it turns out, was the stay-at-home wife of a Canadian mining executive whose company paid all the expenses. I, it turns out, am now the working wife of a Peruvian employee and both of us earn Peruvian wages.

Now there is a lot of abuse of domestic employees in Peru despite the fact that the government had introduced legislation to deal with this, including mandatory registration of employees and a co-payment system for social security and medical coverage – very similar to that in more developed countries. But, after registering my employee – at her direction – she balked at paying the social security contribution of 3% of her salary (to my 9% above what I was already paying), saying that Señora Ann had in fact never bothered with all that, merely paid all the medical expenses as they arose. Having paid for several x-rays for a toe on which a frozen bit of meat had fallen and doctor visits for various vague conditions involving a feeling of depression or a panic attack, I began to feel a bit panic-stricken myself. My savings were dwindling rapidly and her family’s needs were increasing. It was when she seemed to expect me to pay for her teenage son to see a psychologist because he wasn’t getting good marks at school that I realised that the situation was unsustainable.

The expiration of my gringa savings coincided with my finding a job. As a part-time teacher I found that I was making just enough to pay my employee’s salary which, it turned out, was three times the going rate. In addition, my new working hours did not coincide with my employee’s schedule since she needed to collect her daughter after school. So I found myself pelting out of my school every afternoon, catching the bus (to save money) and running several blocks to arrive home panting 5 minutes late and therefore having to pay her taxi home in order for her to collect her daughter on time.

So we parted ways and I went to the dreaded agency and stated my price and requirements. I now have an equally lovely young lady who comes from Apurimac in the Sierra, a 14 hour bus ride from Lima. At first we had a problem understanding each other because of our accents but we make do. She insists on starting and ending each sentence with “Señora” and refers to my husband as “El Señor”. For the first two weeks she refused to put my son on the ground, carrying him in her arms at all times and I had trouble breaking her of her insistence on carrying Smuggies’ schoolbag up and down the stairs.

The first time we went out together – a trip to the supermarket – she refused to let me push the Baby Inca’s stroller. In fact, she would not even let me walk alongside. Or behind. As we walked along I kept unconsciously adjusting my normally impatiently long stride since she seemed incapable of keeping up. Gradually I realized that the slower I walked the slower she walked until we were all but going backwards. I tried starting a conversation, casually dropping back to catch her responses, no good. She maintained a stubborn few yards between us. Finally, in the interest of getting to the damned supermarket before it closed, I gave up and headed our little domestic procession along the broad avenidas of Lima. Had I been Lady Godiva with a crew cut I could not have been more embarrassed.

Imagine me arriving in Tesco's like that?

But now I pay a fair wage and have reliable childcare and two nights free a week. So let’s call that Great Discovery Number One: Paying for your principles can be both expensive and misguided.

To be continued...