Life....

We are overseas, and no surprise, one of the first things we did was hire a maid. It is actually beneficial to our marriage that we have a maid, because I don't like to clean... at all, and neither does Vlad, but both of us hate messy dusty apartments. In the states, we couldn't afford to have someone come clean once a week, so we had to do it ourselves. Which is fine, everyone does it, but in the spirit of women's lib and all, I will not be the only one to clean anything. I hate it! And in the spirit of men's lib and fairness neither will Vlad. So it's generally a constant battle between what we would like to see done, what we are willing to do, and what we can negotiate the other person into doing. BUT! Overseas we can afford to have someone come in twice a week and make our apartment sparkle. No more whose going to clean the toilet fights. No more I'm not mopping the floor this week fights. None of that. Just come home, house is clean. Beautiful.
But now I have guilt. In China, there was no guilt. Our maid was from a village somewhere and what we were paying her was far and above better, and the work was safer, than anything she could have gotten on the local economy. We were paying her something crazily small like a dollar and a half an hour, but if she was working in the city as a laborer in some factory she'd be making less and have the added benefit of risking her life every day when she went to work (take for instance the guys who washed the apartment windows. They went to work suspended from the top of a tall building on a length of rope no bigger than my arm. No saftey harness, no platform, just the rope. I guarantee that our maid was making WAY more than those guys).
But Baku. With communism just ending and the private sector taking some time to work out the corruption, well it's just sad. True, no one is starving. In general I don't feel bad about the population. Everyone looks healthy, suitably dressed, and housed. In China this was often not the case. Almost everyday I saw people, even kids, where I thought to myself there's no way that guy's eaten today, and he HAS a job. So I don't feel overly privileged just because I eat everyday. However, I was talking to our maid today, and I was asking how she learned English. Well, she taught herself while she was in school. And she was in school a long time because she's an economist. She used to work as a manager (I'm not sure if I understood her right) or maybe the head of a department in a company, until she got laid off due to the corruption (maybe she didn't take bribes, or didn't take bribes from the right people I don't know). Before that she worked for an insurance company, and before that she was a government official in a communist organization. HOW CRAZY IS THAT??? She says that she doesn't have any bitterness about this work, but still I feel bad. Would I be able to go from running a section having important things to do, to sweeping someone's floor? And do it cheerfully to? I don't know. I'm barely handling going from the THOUGHT of a legal career to housewife. I don't know if I had actually done stuff. Which is once again why I'm grateful that God has allowed me to be where I am and who I am. I could have easily been born in America with no prospects, or in China with even less prospects.....