Mariaam Bhatti: Tales of a Domestic Worker
Over the December holidays I was feeling a little homesick, thinking of all the things my maternal grandmother and I did together when I was little.
When my granny could afford flour, she would bake ¬– which required improvising a baking oven using what was around her. With a disc-shaped piece of metal placed on the ground, she would draw a circle around it, slightly wider than the metal, then She dig a hole 20-30cm within the circle.
The soil she dug out of the whole would be mixed with water, making it thick enough to be used to hand-plaster the inside of the hole. When that was done would then take the metal disc and light a fire on it using wood that she knew burns slowly and gives off a lot of heat. She would then place the disc and fire into the newly plastered hole to make it hot. This was the equivalent of ‘pre-heating the oven’.
Next she would make dough and get it ready to be baked. It was usually scones she made, but a few times bread too. When they were ready she would place them on another metal disc, lift out the fire from the hole and replace it with the ready-to-bake dough platter. The finishing touch was to cover the hole with the disc carrying the fire, creating a closed oven allowing what was inside to bake perfectly.
I remember these times so fondly, even though I only ever got just one or two scones to taste as granny would take the rest to sell at the nearby school gate at break time. She needed to do that to earn an income occasionally, I know now, but as a child I didn’t understand her ways.
While she was doing this, not far away a domestic worker – with a family considered ‘elite’ in the rural wealth context – was using those same skills more often than my granny to bake what would be the packed lunch for about five children of different school-going ages. It makes so much sense to me now that the skills many women acquire homemaking are often the direct equivalent of the requirements for so-called ‘regular jobs’.
It turns out my granny sold her scones to the teachers at break. For granny this was an occasional way to raise money for seeds for the next ploughing season. But for the domestic worker living nearby, it was neither occasional nor optional. She had to do this every evening – and it was a ‘minor’ chore in addition to her endless everyday list of tasks that included fetching water, collecting firewood, tending to crops and many other menial things. I know all this because that young woman was our relative, and my family often talked about how they felt she was made to work as hard as a mule.
There are many efforts being made to change the perception of domestic work, but to this day, in many rural areas, a domestic worker’s day still starts just after the cock‘s last crow at dawn, and doesn’t end till bedtime. I wish I could say it doesn’t happen like that in the rest of the world, but some women in Ireland today have similarly long hours and poor working conditions as their counterparts in the developing world.
Mariaam Bhatti is a member of the Domestic Workers Action Group and Forced Labour Action Group of the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland.
