Kuwait Times

Published Date: February 26, 2010

Kuwaitis seek independence from housemaids

By Hussain Al-Qatari, Staff Writer

Wash the clothes on Sunday, iron them on Monday. On Tuesday, vacuum the entire house. On Wednesday, clean the toilets and the kitchen from A to Z. Relax on Thursday and Friday, but on Saturday prepare for the week ahead. This is how Manal Ashkanani, a 34-year old housewife, organizes her daily chores.

Manal and her husband are one example of over 1,500 Kuwaiti families who decide not to hire domestic help for their household. This is according to statistics released earlier this month by the Ministry of Interior's Authority of Immigration.

As reported in the Kuwait Times earlier, Kuwait is home to about 600,000 housemaids and domestic workers who mostly come from the Indian Subcontinent or the Southeast Asian region. Housemaids are usually responsible for cleaning, cooking and looking after kids in the household. For many years the complete dependence on housemaids has been the subject of many columnists, satirical plays and dramatic TV soap operas. After all these years, criticism has begun to pay off; families are now shifting towards inde
pendence, away from domestic help.

Their own story
Manal and her husband have been married for 12 years and have three children. They rent an apartment in her in-laws neighborhood, and seldom use the help of any domestic workers. Manal says she doesn't see the point of hiring a housemaid because she is capable of doing the house chores herself. When a time comes that she does need assistance she calls a part-time housemaid who comes every two weeks to help around the house. "I have a job during the day and sometimes on Tuesday I feel that I can't vacuum th
e house myself or iron everything on my own. Paying someone to do specific chores really helps," she says.

Between running errands and helping her children do their homework, Manal says that every minute counts. "My husband and I teach our children that punctuality is very important. If I'm late running errands until seven in the evening, I know that I won't have time to iron all the clothes. My biggest asset is the fact that my husband manages his time efficiently. So, unless I'm sick or we have an emergency in the family, we never have problems doing all our chores," Manal adds.

She believes that teaching children at an early age to help do chores has a very positive impact on them. Umm Jarrah, a 54-year old Kuwaiti woman who has always been a housewife, explains that she doesn't see the need of housemaids for young couples nowadays. "All my three daughters are married and they don't have maids at home. In our time, people were more social and visited each other more often," she says.

By the time her son, the fourth child in the family was born, Umm Jarrah remembers that she had guests coming over every single weekend whether they were in-laws, neighbors or family friends. Big dinners and lunches were a weekly event, she says, insisting that now that these gatherings seldom happen there is no longer a pressing need for domestic workers. "I'm not judging the young generation," she clarifies. "Nowadays both husband and wife work and this leaves them with almost no time for socializing." W
hen her daughters socialize with their friends, she notices that they prefer to meet up with friends in restaurants or cafes rather than visit each other's homes.

No longer a necessity
Maha Al-Anezi, a 47-year old woman and mother to five sons, says that she has had a housemaid for over six years but no longer thinks she is a necessity. Now that all of her sons are old enough to help with the house chores, Maha doesn't see why she needs a housemaid. She has recently retired and now only has home chores to tend to. "My husband has always been against hiring a housemaid. He sees it as a luxury, not a necessity, but there was a period during which we needed someone take over some of the cho
res. Hiring a maid sounded like the best solution," she says.

Now that Maha is retired and her husband is to follow suit, she thinks the idea of a housemaid is farfetched and nothing more than a luxury. Maha says that many of her friends don't believe her when she says that she is comfortable without a housemaid. "It's funny, they tell me that I can borrow their domestic helper if I need something. I appreciate their gesture, really, but there are companies for everything now. You can call a company to send people to clean your house, to dry-clean your clothes, to ca
ter your dinners or lunches," says Maha. Otherwise, the daily house chores are her form of exercise. "I've been meaning to shed some kilos," she jokingly says.