by Karen McConnaughey
One of the first things Bill and I heard when we
moved to Mexico
in 2004 wasn’t ‘don’t drink the water,” it was "don't spoil the
help." This was from someone who had lived here 40 years! When we asked
what this meant, we only got knowing looks and nodding heads from everyone.
We’d never really had a permanent maid or gardener before, and apparently no
one wanted to say out loud what they really meant. So we just dove into it the
best we could. And, since neither one of us liked housework, we thought this
was going to be a great system.
Our first maid just showed up at our door one
day. We thought, “why not?” She lived in Ixtlahuacan and since we knew no one
in our village and the only people we knew in Ajijic were our real estate
agents, we thought luck was smiling on us again, since “God takes care of
idiots!” She didn’t last very long…she just disappeared one day. We saw her
once in the plaza, but she ducked and went the other way. We still don’t know
what we did wrong, but we were going to try to be wiser the next time and make
sure we didn’t spoil the help! Of course, for awhile, we thought ‘we’re adults;
we can clean our own house.” Didn’t work out. We had to fire ourselves and look
for someone more responsible.
We found Vicki working for a friend in our
village. She worked for Adele three days a week, and was looking for more so we
had her come by the house just to look it over…we thought. She walked in,
picked up a broom and started cleaning. We weren’t too good at Spanish at the
time, so we had to call Adele for advice when she started asking us questions.
Unfortunately, I knew the word ‘sucio’
(dirty), and when Vicki was on the phone with Adele, I heard the unfortunate
sentence, “Si, la casa es muy sucio!”
I should have been embarrassed, but I just laughed, because she was right.