Househelp drama

Just when I thought that she was one of the good ones that is when the drama began. This is a story on one of the many househelps that have been employed and stayed in my house. And when I say ‘in my house’ I am referring to my parent’s house because this is Africa and parents own everything you have.

The type of house help that we had was the one that started off being nice and punctual and then a few weeks later their true intentions were revealed. Her name was Grace and she was short and slender and had been gotten from an agency that advertised themselves as ‘Prayerful Hardworking Bible-thumping Church-going Christian House-girls Bureau’ and their motto was (yes, they even had a motto) “Work Hard Pray Hard”. The moment my mother saw this she was convinced that it was probably the best place to get a help who would make Mother Teresa look bad.

When she came with Grace on one Sunday afternoon, she was dressed to the knees and only her face could be seen. She even covered her hands with white gloves and on her head she had a turban like a member of the women’s guild and a light yellow pleated skirt that swept the ground, acardigan with a bunch of zebras embodied to it and to finish it off, she had multicolored socks on.

Despite her unique fashion sense, the other thing that seemed unique was the fact that she was trying to pass herself as an oldwoman when she was just twenty four. From far, she looked like a forty year old who gets cold on a warm day. She was trying so hard to have that elderly, motherly presence but that didn’t fool me.

The first few weeks that she was at the house, went off well. She did all the chores in time. She prayed every night before she slept and it wasn’t a silentprayer. It was like she had a megaphone lodged in her throat. Upon meeting any of my mother’s guests, she would insist that she was a virgin even though no one brought it up. She had a bible within her reach andinstead of singing in the shower; she would say out loud the books of The Bible as the appeared in the book. She went to church all the time and never missed a single choir practice. This made my mum use her as an example of how me and my siblings should be whenever we did something wrong.

All seemed well until after one Sunday after she came from church. She had come back home looking gloomy and sad and didn’t even talk to anyone. Knowing what I know now, it turned out that she was seeing the youth pastor at the church and he had gone to Mombasa and now he was being seen around with another girl. Talk about drama. For days to come, we would come to see what heartbreak would do to her.

On that Monday, she woke up late, later than usual. My mother, knowing something was up, didn’t do anything about it then. She let it slide and made our breakfast. This went on for two more days until my mum decided to ask her what had happened to her. She claimed that she had lost her turban when she went to church but she was doing fine.

For the following days, her performance became mediocre. The food that she cookedhad to be burnt and that also included tea. She burnt a lot of clothes when she ironed them. She would bring me food to school late. Her prayer routine was no longer existent. She traded her elderly look for a younger look by wearing tight jeans and oversized t-shirts around the house. She even got into a fight with one of our neighbor’s helps which ended with a patch of her hair being pulled out.

This made my mother angry and she stepped in again with one of her lectures. I don’t know what she told her because at the end of it she was sobbing and started packing her bags and left in the middle of the night and not to return.

Everything after that incident, felt normal and calm. My mother divided the chores between me and my siblings. She swore not to get house girls from that bureau againeven though the one who followed was for the same agency. All seemed well until one day the police were at the door together with the help seemed like she hadn’t eaten and seemed to have only been crying. She accused my mother for chasing her away in the middle of the night and because of this she was raped.

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