Overview

By chance in the past few weeks I have read several articles about labor and migration on the Arabian Peninsula such as

• Gardner, Andrew and Sharon Nagy. (2008). “Introduction: New Ethnographic Fieldwork Among Migrants, Residents and Citizens in the Arab States of the Gulf.” City and Society 20.1: 1-4.
• Nagy, Sharon. (1998). “‘This Time I Think I’ll Try a Filipina’: Global and Local Influences on Relations Between Foreign Household Workers and Their Employers in Doha, Qatar.” City and Society 10: 83-103.
• Sarmadi, Behzad. (2013). “‘Bachelor’ in the City: Urban Transformation and Matter Out of Place in Dubai.” Journal of Arabian Studies 3: 196-214.

There are lots of numbers, data sets, opinions and ideas in these texts – but no sense of what it’s like to interact with other expat workers. There is ethnographic work with and about them, but nothing about the writer’s personal economic exchanges: how to hire, discuss and pay wages, decide work load, etc. This isn’t a fault of the articles which have different objectives, but reading these texts made me reflect on my connections to other expat workers, how I manage them and how they manage me.

This essay will talk about my decision to hire help, later essays will talk in detail about some of the people who have worked for me and the types of adjustments that we both make. [The information about wages and dates are from monthly lists of expenses that I have kept since I moved to Dhofar. 1 Omani Riyal is about $2.40; there are 1000 baisa in one Riyal so the 500 baisa bill is worth about $1.20.]

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(photo by S. B.)

It is difficult to write about hiring people without sounding complacent, a point that was brought home when I read an ethnographic text about Western expats on the Arabian Peninsula who hired nannies and housekeepers. The author vilified the employers as spoiled, lazy, racist and delusional. The author had obviously never hired anyone to do work for them and had a healthy dislike of those who did.

Writing back against that attitude is not easy. I know I could do all the housework myself but I choose to hire someone to clean my house. This can be seen as indolent but I think it’s more helpful to situate one’s positionality when being critical. “I would never…” is very different than “I have never been in the position to…”.

My decision to hire help is predicated on several lifestyle differences such as how housing designs here allow bugs and sand to enter, the monsoon season and the size of houses.

When I visit my mom in the summer it always takes me a few days to tone down my bug vigilance. “MOM, CRUMBS!!!” I yell on the first morning when I walk into the kitchen and see evidence of sliced bread on the countertop. I quickly rinse the bread board, wipe down the bread knife and inspect the countertops for any speck of bread. Luckily, she has great tolerance for this and within a day or two I mellow out as I remember that a few crumbs on the counter sink will not induce hordes of critters to invade her kitchen.

When I get back to my own kitchen in Dhofar, I return to my watchful ways because I live in a cement block house where ants and cockroaches come out from cracks in the tiling and up from the sink and floor drains. They even crawl out though the electric outlet openings. Twice I have had mice scurry up to my first-floor apartment through the washing machine outtake pipe. There are lizards on the walls, bees flying in through the AC vents and spiders galore.

When I talk about the people I have hired to help me by cleaning my house, I know it can seem like I am lazy. I moved to the Middle East with bona fides of self-sufficiency. When I was a child, I had daily chores and once I lived on my own, I have doing all the cleaning myself. But life is different herein Oman.

For example, I have done my own laundry since I was in 6th grade and it’s simple: put everything in washing machine, then the dryer, fold and put away. But there are no dryers here and my top-loading washer has two bins. You put the clothes in the left-hand side bin, add soap, let it fill with water and turn the knob to agitate the water. Then you let the water drain and lift the sopping wet fabric up and place it in the right-hand bin which spins the water out. Then you hang everything on drying racks, wait for it all to dry, fold and put away. Going to a friend’s house and using her washer/dryer combo in the States makes me ask, “What do you do with all your spare time? Put your clothes in the machine, come back an hour later to find everything clean and dry? It’s a dream!”

Also, my friends’ houses are not in close proximity to deserts. “Sweeping the floor” means one thing in my mom’s house and something very different after a 3-day, 40 kph sandstorm in my Dhofari house where you can see daylight between the window frames and house walls. It’s a joy to sweep in my mom’s house; it takes about 5 minutes and you end up with a tiny pile to discard. After a sandstorm here I need to sweep the entire house and dust everything which takes hours. And there are usually more than 5 sandstorms every winter.

In addition, from June until the end of August, Dhofar has a monsoon season with drizzle and fog on most days. As this is also the time of annual vacation, if there is no one to clean the floors, turn fans on and off and keep watch, mold can grow. I brought a friend home from the airport when she returned to start the school year and when we walked into her living room, her sofas were coated with black mold. When I came back from vacation this summer and opened my car door, the front seats and dashboard cover were green with mold, there were even threads of mold hanging down from steering wheel.

When I lived in Madison, Boston, Minneapolis, and Grand Forks, I had a studio or one-bedroom apartment which was easy to take care of. In Salalah, apartment buildings are usually exclusively expat and I want to live in Omani neighborhoods, which means renting a small house or a floor of a house which are built for extended families. My “small” apartment has a salle, majlis, kitchen, 3 small bedrooms and 3 bathrooms. Friends who have rented houses with 4 or 5 bedrooms just shut the doors of the rooms they don’t use but I would rather hire someone to clean all the spaces.

A related point is that it’s better for me to have a slightly larger place to live as there are fewer “third spaces” here. In the month of Ramadan, for example, cafes are closed until after sunset. In the monsoon season, roads can be so crowded, it’s better to stay home. During Covid lockdowns and curfews I was really grateful I could turn the 3rd bedroom into a work space for on-line teaching. I also like that the woman who cleans my house has a key and can feed the cats if I am away for the weekend camping.

In addition to the calculations of spending time (washing clothes, sweeping, getting rid of mold) vs. spending money (paying someone to clean my house), there is the aspect of how easy it is to get help from someone who wants to work.

When I owned a car in the States, I would wash it now and then but here it is a government regulation that cars must be clean. So I could either spend ten minutes every morning wiping the sand off my truck or I hire someone to do it for me. In most parking lots of large stores, there are expat men who do this work for a small fee. Where I work, there are two men who come every morning to the covered parking area. You can pay them 500 baisa for each cleaning if you want it now and then or 10 Riyal for the month.

There are many such opportunities and I usually much hire and/ or tip everyone both because it makes my life easier and because I have been in need in my own life. I spent years without health insurance because I couldn’t afford it. I have always worked since I was in high school but I had to take out student loans for college. If my older brother had not kindly settled my student loans, it would have taken me at least a decade to pay them off. After the 1997 Red River flood, I ate Red Cross meals for weeks. Having received so much help in my life, I feel I need to be generous.

Every week, I give a money to the people who clean the building where I work and I tip the men who bag groceries. Although it’s not habitually done here, I always tip wait-staff and delivery men. When expat government employees are cutting weeds near my house, I hand out cash and bottles of water. If it’s safe to pull to the side of the road and I have cash in dashboard cubby hole, I give cash to the men who sweep streets. If I have time when there is a team of expat men gardening along the roadside near my house, I will buy cookies, as well as liters of water and soda, and hand them over.

Before I became an Associate Professor, I worked in sandwich shops, restaurants, libraries, a bookstore and an antique store and I can push my own grocery cart. But if I am walking in the parking lot of a grocery store and a man in the jumpsuit uniform of a cleaner walks towards me with his hands extended, I know he is asking to bring my cart to my car for a 1 Riyal tip. So I step away from my cart and let him push – a move that can be seen as being lazy/ exploitative or giving someone a chance to earn extra money.