Yesterday was one of the most challenging days that I have had in Peru so far, because of the problems that I had with communicating in Spanish. I'm trying hard to learn as quickly as I can, by practicing my Spanish as much as possible. There are times when I feel confident, capable and able to make myself understand. When that happens I feel really good, like I can make this experience work and be able to handle whatever comes my way. Yesterday was not one of those times. Here's what happened:
Situation #1: Pest controller (exterminador)
When someone comes to the house, either to visit us or to do work (eg. maintenance, which is happening daily at the moment) the vigilante at the gate calls us on a special phone which rings just once to tell us that we have a visitor. I pick up the phone, say "Hola" then listen for any recognizable words that might give me a clue about what is going on. I didn't really understand much of what the vigilante told me except that obviously someone was at the house to do something, so I said, "Si, bueno" so that they would be allowed to come in.
It turned out that the visitor was a man who had come to place rat poison in the garden. The gardener told us that there were a lot of rats on our property because it backs onto an agricultural area where local people grow onions. Evidently the rats require continual poisoning campaigns because when one group dies, more come and so it goes on. Anyway, the man arrived carrying a bag of pellets and rattled off a lot of words in Spanish that I did not understand. I told him (in Spanish) that I didn't understand and asked him to please repeat, which did not benefit me in any way as I was still totally confused about what he wanted. I went inside and got our Latin American phrasebook which had nothing at all that I could use with which to communicate to this poor man who by now probably thought that he was dealing with some unfortunate house-bound gringa who couldn't even speak basic Spanish. By using gestures, his two words of English (rats and poison), he indicated that he wanted to put rat poison around the garden, but not inside the house, and I told him (lots of nodding, "Si, bueno" etc) that this would be OK. So he left and didn't come back. I was very confused because I thought that we had agreed on what he was going to do, but obviously I hadn't understood as much as I thought I had.
Situation #2: Interviewing housekeepers (amas de llaves)
We will need someone to be with N for an hour in the morning after we leave for work while N waits for the school bus to come, and also to be with him in the afternoon for a couple of hours while he waits for us to come home. Since we are both working (and it's an expectation that ex-pats will employ home helpers), we might as well employ someone who can look after N as well as help us keep the house clean. Through friends we were able to arrange for two women to come to the house yesterday to be interviewed as potential housekeepers. I was very nervous about interviewing housekeepers and didn't sleep too well the night before. I've never had a housekeeper before. I've been in Peru for a week and I didn't really know how this sort of interview was supposed to go. I didn't know what the applicants' expectations would be and what the normal protocol was, and I worried a lot about saying or doing something wrong that would upset or offend the person whom I was interviewing. I didn't want to be an ignorant gringa. I also knew that a lot depends on us getting someone reliable and trustworthy to look after our son and help us to successfully manage being working parents in Peru (it's not normal for both the husband and wife to be working here, so most ex-pats don't need someone to look after their children for the hours that we do, as most of the ex-pat wives are at home for their kids. Most ex-pats just hire someone to come and clean the house, perhaps cook for them, and occasionally babysit the kids when the parents need to go out). So I put a lot of pressure on myself for everything to go well.
A friend volunteered to be my translator for the interviews and she also arranged for Louisa, the official Freeport Spanish teacher and translator to help me out. So I thought that with these ladies with me, everything would go reasonably smoothly and that I would be able to get through the interviews without too many problems. I'd be able to communicate what I wanted to say and I'd be able to understand the applicant's answers. Except that my friends arrived late - almost 15 minutes after the first applicant arrived.
When the phone rang to announce my visitor I had expected (and hoped) that it would be my friends but instead it was the first applicant, who I knew did not speak English. Hoping that my friends would arrive any minute, I invited the lady inside and did my best to speak to her. We got through the basic pleasantries then (understandably) she looked at me expectantly for the interview to begin. I had scribbled down a list of questions to ask and tried to ask them. I really felt sorry for the lady on the other side of the table. I would say a couple of words then have to frantically look through the dictionary to try to find the word that I wanted, then rack my brain to figure out how to put that into some sort of sensible sentence. Most of the time she had no clue what I was on about and just looked at me with an uncomprehending stare. That only made me feel worse and I got more and more frustrated as I apologized over and over for my terrible Spanish. Finally the phone rang and my friends were able to put me out of my misery. With their help we got through the rest of the interview, and the second one without too much pain.
The minimum wage for a domestic worker in Peru is 750 Soles per month for full-time work (a 40-hour week) which is about US$285 a month. On top of that if they work full-time their employer has to pay for their medical insurance (about 140 Soles per month) and social security. Considering what they do for their employers, it is cheap.
After the interviews my friend left and Louisa, the Spanish teacher, asked me how I was doing, at which point I basically unraveled and dissolved into tears. Her question was like the pin that popped the big balloon of stress that had been building up inside me. It's not that I don't want to be in Peru, because I do. It's not that I don't want to hire a housekeeper, because I do (I wish I'd hired a house-cleaner years ago and who wouldn't want someone to cook for them when they've had a busy day at work?). It's just that even if you want to do it and see it as a positive thing for you and your family, moving to another country, particularly one where you have to learn a new language, isn't easy.
Even with all the support that we have from our employer and our fellow ex-pats (who have reached out to us like an instant extended family), living here is still a strange landscape to navigate. I haven't started working yet (partly because N hasn't started school yet (I am staying home until a few days after he starts) and partly because we are still trying to sort out the security agent situation so that P and I (who work different schedules and in different parts of the mine) can both get to and from work on time) and although I'm assured that I can take the time that I need to get N settled and comfortable with school and our new living situation, work won't wait forever and I feel a lot of pressure (mostly self-imposed) to get there and get started on the mountain of work that I know is already waiting for me. None of this is made any easier when you add in that just a few days after we arrived, my godmother in New Zealand passed away, and yesterday was her funeral.
In the two months before we left Arizona I rarely got to bed before 11pm (working full-time and trying to do as much as possible at home to get ready for moving, with P away for 6 of those 8 weeks) so my immunity seems to have taken a major hit. I have been fighting off a medical textbook of minor illnesses and infections that seem to take much longer to resolve than they probably would if I'd been getting the right amount of sleep and eating properly. When your body's physical resources (energy, immunity etc.) get depleted, it seems that the emotional resources take a hit too, and I think that's where I ended up yesterday. The physical, mental and emotional stresses all got the better of me.
In some ways I think about it (moving to another country) as a bit like being a new parent. In each week there will be a day that's not as good as the others, and within each day there will be an hour that's more difficult than the others in that day. But in the end I hope that we will be able to look back on this experience and be happy that we did it and that it will be a positive experience for our family.
Situation #1: Pest controller (exterminador)
When someone comes to the house, either to visit us or to do work (eg. maintenance, which is happening daily at the moment) the vigilante at the gate calls us on a special phone which rings just once to tell us that we have a visitor. I pick up the phone, say "Hola" then listen for any recognizable words that might give me a clue about what is going on. I didn't really understand much of what the vigilante told me except that obviously someone was at the house to do something, so I said, "Si, bueno" so that they would be allowed to come in.
It turned out that the visitor was a man who had come to place rat poison in the garden. The gardener told us that there were a lot of rats on our property because it backs onto an agricultural area where local people grow onions. Evidently the rats require continual poisoning campaigns because when one group dies, more come and so it goes on. Anyway, the man arrived carrying a bag of pellets and rattled off a lot of words in Spanish that I did not understand. I told him (in Spanish) that I didn't understand and asked him to please repeat, which did not benefit me in any way as I was still totally confused about what he wanted. I went inside and got our Latin American phrasebook which had nothing at all that I could use with which to communicate to this poor man who by now probably thought that he was dealing with some unfortunate house-bound gringa who couldn't even speak basic Spanish. By using gestures, his two words of English (rats and poison), he indicated that he wanted to put rat poison around the garden, but not inside the house, and I told him (lots of nodding, "Si, bueno" etc) that this would be OK. So he left and didn't come back. I was very confused because I thought that we had agreed on what he was going to do, but obviously I hadn't understood as much as I thought I had.
Situation #2: Interviewing housekeepers (amas de llaves)
We will need someone to be with N for an hour in the morning after we leave for work while N waits for the school bus to come, and also to be with him in the afternoon for a couple of hours while he waits for us to come home. Since we are both working (and it's an expectation that ex-pats will employ home helpers), we might as well employ someone who can look after N as well as help us keep the house clean. Through friends we were able to arrange for two women to come to the house yesterday to be interviewed as potential housekeepers. I was very nervous about interviewing housekeepers and didn't sleep too well the night before. I've never had a housekeeper before. I've been in Peru for a week and I didn't really know how this sort of interview was supposed to go. I didn't know what the applicants' expectations would be and what the normal protocol was, and I worried a lot about saying or doing something wrong that would upset or offend the person whom I was interviewing. I didn't want to be an ignorant gringa. I also knew that a lot depends on us getting someone reliable and trustworthy to look after our son and help us to successfully manage being working parents in Peru (it's not normal for both the husband and wife to be working here, so most ex-pats don't need someone to look after their children for the hours that we do, as most of the ex-pat wives are at home for their kids. Most ex-pats just hire someone to come and clean the house, perhaps cook for them, and occasionally babysit the kids when the parents need to go out). So I put a lot of pressure on myself for everything to go well.
A friend volunteered to be my translator for the interviews and she also arranged for Louisa, the official Freeport Spanish teacher and translator to help me out. So I thought that with these ladies with me, everything would go reasonably smoothly and that I would be able to get through the interviews without too many problems. I'd be able to communicate what I wanted to say and I'd be able to understand the applicant's answers. Except that my friends arrived late - almost 15 minutes after the first applicant arrived.
When the phone rang to announce my visitor I had expected (and hoped) that it would be my friends but instead it was the first applicant, who I knew did not speak English. Hoping that my friends would arrive any minute, I invited the lady inside and did my best to speak to her. We got through the basic pleasantries then (understandably) she looked at me expectantly for the interview to begin. I had scribbled down a list of questions to ask and tried to ask them. I really felt sorry for the lady on the other side of the table. I would say a couple of words then have to frantically look through the dictionary to try to find the word that I wanted, then rack my brain to figure out how to put that into some sort of sensible sentence. Most of the time she had no clue what I was on about and just looked at me with an uncomprehending stare. That only made me feel worse and I got more and more frustrated as I apologized over and over for my terrible Spanish. Finally the phone rang and my friends were able to put me out of my misery. With their help we got through the rest of the interview, and the second one without too much pain.
The minimum wage for a domestic worker in Peru is 750 Soles per month for full-time work (a 40-hour week) which is about US$285 a month. On top of that if they work full-time their employer has to pay for their medical insurance (about 140 Soles per month) and social security. Considering what they do for their employers, it is cheap.
After the interviews my friend left and Louisa, the Spanish teacher, asked me how I was doing, at which point I basically unraveled and dissolved into tears. Her question was like the pin that popped the big balloon of stress that had been building up inside me. It's not that I don't want to be in Peru, because I do. It's not that I don't want to hire a housekeeper, because I do (I wish I'd hired a house-cleaner years ago and who wouldn't want someone to cook for them when they've had a busy day at work?). It's just that even if you want to do it and see it as a positive thing for you and your family, moving to another country, particularly one where you have to learn a new language, isn't easy.
Even with all the support that we have from our employer and our fellow ex-pats (who have reached out to us like an instant extended family), living here is still a strange landscape to navigate. I haven't started working yet (partly because N hasn't started school yet (I am staying home until a few days after he starts) and partly because we are still trying to sort out the security agent situation so that P and I (who work different schedules and in different parts of the mine) can both get to and from work on time) and although I'm assured that I can take the time that I need to get N settled and comfortable with school and our new living situation, work won't wait forever and I feel a lot of pressure (mostly self-imposed) to get there and get started on the mountain of work that I know is already waiting for me. None of this is made any easier when you add in that just a few days after we arrived, my godmother in New Zealand passed away, and yesterday was her funeral.
In the two months before we left Arizona I rarely got to bed before 11pm (working full-time and trying to do as much as possible at home to get ready for moving, with P away for 6 of those 8 weeks) so my immunity seems to have taken a major hit. I have been fighting off a medical textbook of minor illnesses and infections that seem to take much longer to resolve than they probably would if I'd been getting the right amount of sleep and eating properly. When your body's physical resources (energy, immunity etc.) get depleted, it seems that the emotional resources take a hit too, and I think that's where I ended up yesterday. The physical, mental and emotional stresses all got the better of me.
In some ways I think about it (moving to another country) as a bit like being a new parent. In each week there will be a day that's not as good as the others, and within each day there will be an hour that's more difficult than the others in that day. But in the end I hope that we will be able to look back on this experience and be happy that we did it and that it will be a positive experience for our family.
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