Our Cleaning Lady

Our suitcases are packed, our bills are paid, and our tickets are printed. If everything goes as planned, we'll be in Florida at this time tomorrow.

More importantly, our apartment is cleaner than it's been since we moved in.

Yesterday, for the first time since moving to Colombia, we hired someone to clean our apartment for us. Previously I had been against it for ethical and financial reasons, but after living here for so long, I've come to some conclusions. First of all, having someone clean your apartment on a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly basis is not the same thing as having a maid, especially a maid that lives with you. My mother had a cleaning lady for many years because she was working and going to school and raising three kids alone. Most of our fellow teachers have someone who comes and cleans at least twice a month. We were apparently the only hold-outs. Ethically, I am against "maids" because it separates and defines the social classes if you have a maid that you order around while you sit on your butt. Even so, since we're both working 50+ hours a week and then doing more work at home, maybe it is okay to have someone clean for us. I don't know.

This past week I was sick, tired, busy, and not in the mood to do the kind of deep cleaning required before leaving on a long vacation. Warren agreed that paying someone else to clean might be worth it, and so we found Maria, a young cleaning lady that was recommended to us by the Spanish teacher at LPV.

Maria arrived yesterday morning at 8:00 a.m., almost 2 hours after we had left for school. When we came home around 2, she was still here, scrubbing our floors. We had left a list of instructions, but she far surpassed any and all expectations we had. She did our laundry, cleaned our bathrooms, organized our closets, folded our clothes, mopped our floors, washed our curtains and windows, and finished a few dishes we had left. Then she cleaned out our refrigerator, and the woman even DEFROSTED our freezer. (It had about 5 inches of ice all the way around, and the entire week we kept saying "We really need to defrost that before we leave".) She cleaned and organized all of my kitchen cabinets, and she ironed. She also cut up a watermelon for us as an afternoon snack. It was awesome.

To get over my ethical dilemma, I also had to get over my financial one. Normally, Maria charges 25,000 pesos a day, and she's allowed to eat whatever we have in the apartment. That means she makes $12.50 and, in our apartment, some pretty lame food. (We haven't been grocery shopping because we didn't want food left in the fridge.) We paid her quite a bit more than 25,000 pesos, because I felt guilty. Also, she DEFROSTED OUR FREEZER. I felt better about having her clean up my messes, and I have to admit--we employed her for a day, and that's got to be better than not being employed, right?

Our apartment looks amazing, and everything is clean. She got every spot off the floor, she cleaned out cobwebs... I'm still in shock.

Anyway, we still can't really afford to have her come very often, but we'll definitely be calling Maria again. She rocks.