This wonderful woman in our lives is called Rehema, or "Ray" for short. She just turned 25 years old on August 28, and she is a Muslim originally from Tanga (the north part of Tanzania). She has been working for us since last September and we are so thankful for her. She is a hard worker, very honest and has a pretty good grasp of English. Here she is, posing with Emily!
Ray works for us about 30 hours a week, from around 9 a.m. - 3 p.m., Monday to Friday. Until June, we had no washing machine and so she hand-washed all our clothing, every day. Although we now have a machine, she still needs to hang out all the laundry to air dry on the clothesline. In the rainy season, this involved even more work as she would trudge it all outside, hang it up, see it start to rain, trudge it all inside and re-hang it on the clotheslines under the roof, see the sun come out, trudge it all back outside... some days this cycle would repeat three and four times! Sometimes even despite all her valiant efforts to take advantage of the brief periods of sun, it would still take things 3 days to dry. She also irons all the clothes (when we have power, of course!) and puts them away in our drawers and closets.
Among the many other things she does, Ray cleans our 4 bathrooms, sweeps and mops the floors, does all the dishes, empties the trash cans and hauls it all out to the burn pile. She washes all our shoes, windows, patio, everything! It's hard to describe the level of dust (in the dry season) and mud (in the rainy season) that accumulates. It really is necessary to mop every day (and despite all this cleaning, our feet are still filthy on the bottoms from walking on the tile floors).
Ray lives quite far from us and so she must ride a crowded dala dala (bus) every day and then walk up a steep hill near our house just to get to the place where she then works so hard!
For all this effort, Ray is paid the equivalent of $100 U.S. per month plus her bus fare. It still makes me uncomfortable to be paying someone less than $1 per hour for hard, manual labor, but this is a well-paying job by Tanzanian standards and Ray has told us often how grateful she is for the work.
Imagine doing all this work even while 8+ months pregnant! Last Friday was her last day working for us as she is beginning her 3 month maternity leave. The baby is due on September 17 and I'm sure that Ray is excited but also very nervous. Infant mortality rates are astoundingly high here, and Ray lost her first baby, a girl, in February 2013, when she was only 3 days old, possibly due to jaundice. This time, Ray told me she is determined to give birth in a private hospital instead of a government hospital. The cost for a private hospital? About $90 U.S. I'm thankful that through the generosity of our supporters, we have been able to pay Ray through her maternity leave and so she can afford a better-quality hospital.
In her typical, hard-working way, Dada Ray set up her maternity replacement before she left: her cousin, Dada Sarah. Ray took Sarah with her to work last week so that she could introduce her to us and show her the routines. Ray is very concerned for us because Sarah only speaks Swahili!
Although we are so thrilled for her to become a mama, I already miss her terribly. Ray is a very quiet person but her presence in the house was always so uplifting. Over time, we learned each other's routines and preferences and had an easy familiarity with each other in the house. It's hard to have a new person in my space, especially someone that speaks NO English and still doesn't know the way we prefer things to be done! I'm sure we'll adjust but it will be a time of transition.
Please pray for Ray and the safe arrival of her baby! And also please pray that my Swahili gets better, quickly, so that I can begin to get to know Dada Sarah (and help instruct her as to where my pots and pans should go!)
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