The Dirt Squad – an Insecure Life
The Dirt Squad – an Insecure Life.
a reader submission from the forthcoming book "Telling Tales from Turkey" by three teachers now living in Izmir
Although cleaning ladies may be a prolific breed, their characters are widely variable. My neighbours and I once shared one we had to nickname ‘The Terminator’, because nothing electrical worked after she had made her rounds that day. She usually managed to disconnect every plug and point encountered, either by pulling them out or by altering the contact somehow, making a loose connection. This was maddening for my neighbours as they would come home to find their computer was ‘down’ again.
Another one would diligently clean the flat and even feed my cats when I was away, until I got the phone bill and discovered she had been calling home, very long distance, and chatting away to her mother and relatives. After a long deliberation with my conscience (cleaning ladies are hard to find and generally earn a pittance for long hours of scrubbing) I decided to challenge her about this bill. She quickly denied it so we had reached a stalemate. More deliberations with my conscience led me to show the bill, - which fortunately was itemised - to her husband, our ‘doorman’ or caretaker (‘kapıcı’ in Turkish). I pointed out the numbers I did not recognise and his face went white with shock and anger. He didn’t know what to say, but was adamant that they would now have to leave this site and job because of the shame and scandal his wife had brought upon them. Hastily reassuring him that there was no need to inform anyone else about this we agreed that he would pay off the amount owing by monthly instalments. Unfortunately I later heard that this mild mannered and considerate kapıcı then hit her that night, so I felt terrible at having been the instigator of such an act of anger. I wondered if I should really have said anything at all. Needless to say she never cleaned for me again and I had to find another ‘cat sitter’ too.
It was after this event that the ‘terminator’ arrived, and despite her regular destruction of electrical conduits we got along well enough for a few years until I moved house again. Terminator was young – about 28 –and had a small son who had some kind of physical disability so she sometimes brought him with her if she was cleaning for me in the mornings, as his school ‘shift’ started in the afternoons. Terminator would fit in several ‘clients’ a day, doing a few hours here and there to supplement her husband’s small salary as a factory worker.
I must add here that a reasonable grasp of Turkish is essential if one is to get on at all well with one’s cleaning lady.
My first experience of such a marvellous helper was in Ankara when my Swiss friend and colleague recommended her cleaning lady Habibe to me.
Habibe was probably in her mid-fifties with snowy white hair under her traditional headscarf. She would prattle away to me in fairly incomprehensible Turkish while I would struggle to get the gist of it. She was really like a warm-hearted aunty or granny, and would insist I go back to bed with a cup of tea when she arrived so that she could start on the kitchen and other rooms. In other words, keep me out of the way. This suited us both. However, I was a little put out when she arrived one day and immediately asked if she could watch the TV. Apparently it was ‘her soap opera’ that she would be missing that day. I grudgingly agreed and felt that i was really being used this time, but sure enough, after thirty minutes she switched it off happily and began her work, explaining it was a crucial part of the story and she hadn’t wanted to miss it. A TV addict myself (for hospital dramas) I had to admit I quite understood. It never happened again and when I asked her why she breezily replied that that particular soap had finished now.
Habibe lived in a ‘gece kondular’ or shanty town, or slum region, somewhere nearby on the hills. I gave her a lift home one day and dropped her off in an area of scrubland with small bungalow-style dwellings which looked rather ramshackle. As it is traditional to give one’s cleaning lady a set of clothes to work in at the start of her ‘contract’ I had given her an old track suit of mine which she’d said would be just fine. I’d also given her a nice long blue knitted cardigan which a friend had knitted for me years before. I’d practically lived in it and it was getting worn out. Habibe had admired it and I thought it would help keep her warm in the long winters there.
It lasted a week at her place.
Apparently she had washed it and hung it out to dry and someone in their neighbourhood had stolen it. How could that happen, I’d wondered aloud, and where had she hung it to dry?
‘Oh we don’t have washing lines’, she’d said, ‘so I spread it out on the bushes outside’. Enough said.
Today, hundreds of miles away from Ankara and my first cleaning lady, I am watching, somewhat concerned, as my cleaning lady ‘Lu’ balances precariously outside the window, perched on a narrow ledge in her socks and Turkish pantaloons as she attacks the window with vigour.
It has always concerned me that cleaning ladies do not earn “danger money”, nor even get paid social security or holiday pay. Theirs is a secret world of householders’ cleaning and ironing, hours and days arranged informally and subject to the whims of the lady of the house.
You may well find this particular householder to be cruel and heartless, sending her cleaner out onto a parapet, but believe me, I have even brought extendable cleaning mops from the UK, and tried to get her to use them from inside the house. She says she prefers to do it her way as she’s used to it and does a better job that way.
In summer, my poor cleaning lady stays home and waits for the telephone to ring in the autumn. However, if she is lucky, someone will ring her and take her to clean their holiday home. They may keep her overnight there while she scrubs floors and cleans the winter grime off the windows. She may even be lucky enough to do this again at the end of the summer, and these occasional jobs keep her going through the hottest months of the year. She has no other source of income, as her husband doesn’t work due to ill health and she has no certified training of any other kind. She is now over 60 so other employment opportunities are unlikely.
They were forced to leave their home in Bulgaria during the “troubles” there, and came with what they could carry to Turkey. This was maybe 15 years ago, but they have only just been granted Turkish residency and got Turkish passports. This means that they have not been entitled to sickness benefit or a pension, and can only now start the long bureaucratic procedures involved in winning these rights. One can only speculate on the kind of life they now lead and how they make ends meet, knowing that this situation is not unusual. Thousands of Turkish families are also living on the bread line with no welfare state to provide for them. Supplementary benefits such as single parent allowances, housing benefit, unemployment benefit etc… are not an option in Turkey. They simply don’t exist.