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| Maids by Quétinbec 07/13/2010, 7:26am PDT | ||||
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| The maids here are all Fillipino, Indian, or Ethiopian. Most of the live in maids aren't allowed to leave the house and don't get a single day off. A Bahraini guy in my office once tried to justify to me why he wouldn't let his Filipino maid out of the house. He told me these 'horror' stories about pimps who pose as water delivery boys. The only person most maids are allowed to see on their own is the water delivery 'boy'. I say 'boy' because a boy is the name Arabs give anyone who's doing a shitty job. So, a 60 year Indian man who bags groceries is called boy. You are 'boss' and he is 'boy'. If you say 'excuse me' he won't respond. You either have to tap him on the shoulder or say, "BOY!!!! HERE!!!!!"
Anyway, he was saying how these water delivery boys help the maids escape from their awful live-in-maid life by promising them work at a restaurant or something, only to later trap them at some hotel and force them into sex-work. His solution, and the point of his whole story to me: NEVER leave the maid alone with the water delivery boy! He was saying how he gets his water delivered in bulk on the weekend! Hahahahaha! This same guy thinks he's really kind to the foreign workers. He's always complaining about the bad arabs who beat or rape their maids. He considers himself a total gentleman. For intance, I once scraped quite a bit of rice into the wastepaper basket in our office. He was like, "No, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?! The Indian cleaning staff like rice." He pulled out one of the plates with some leftover rice on it, and went to take it to one of the cleaning staff who sleeps against a wall behind a fridge in one of the office kitchens. When I said to him, "But there were tissues and stuff on that." He said, "It's OK. They'll eat anything. You need to be more considerate of them." A lot of people think arabs are intolerant. Arabs are the most racist people on Earth, but they are very tolerant. There are more Indians, Asians, and Westerners in the Gulf than Arabs. The ratio is 6 foreigners to 1 Arab in some countries. A guy I work with tried to bring his Omanese boyfriend to a bar in the foreigner district. His boyfriend was turned away by the bouncer for wearing traditional Arabic clothing. After he told me this story, I noticed that almost all of the non-whore bars in this country have policies excluding people in traditional Arabic dress, which is a good half of the men here. They're forbidden to wear their own clothes in many, many parts of their own country. The only time I've heard of anything so fucked up was in Brisbane Australia, where, I shit you not, there are nightclubs (plural) that bar people wearing collars! When I was outraged about this, the Australians I lived and worked with were like, "Well, before that rule, too many people were wearing their work clothes to clubs." I'd be wearing a short sleeve dress shirt and jeans, and I'd have to roll the collar inside my shirt in front of everyone before the bouncers before would let me in. Fucking Australians. |
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