The Help - Nairobi Version

“With money, you can do anything.”

These were the words of our housekeeper last week, as she stood before me with a small smile on her face.

I was tempted to reply, “Well, money can’t buy you EVERYTHING.”

But luckily, I didn’t. Instead, I said nothing, smiled back, and listened.

The fact of the matter is, when you are truly poor, having money or not DOES change everything. Being poor makes you incredibly vulnerable – to losing what little you have, to being taken advantage of, to missing out on basic services and opportunities, and the list goes on.

The edge between having enough or not is sharp and cruel. Even among those who have next to nothing, having a bit more creates opportunity – and envy.

Our housekeeper has been embroiled in a family dispute involving land and inheritance for several months. It revolves around her husband and some shady dealings on the part of his siblings to cheat him out of the small parcel of land that is his part of the family inheritance.

Land ownership is a very touchy issue here in Kenya. Many people have been robbed of their lands through colonialism, and post-colonial corruption, cronyism, and general dirty dealings.  Tenure and title are not always secure. Families are large, and plots broken up into smaller and smaller pieces across the generations. By tradition, only men have been allowed to inherit land. That is supposed to have changed with the passing of a new national constitution a few years back, but practices are slow to change.

In the case of our housekeeper, her in-laws have been stalling her attempts to obtain proper, formal title to their land, because they know that her husband’s health is failing from decades of chain smoking. She has become increasingly frantic knowing that the title is the only way to preserve their share of the family land, and the house on it, which they built largely due to her hard work.

After some ugly scenes and threats at home, she eventually came to me to ask for financial help to pay for the surveyor and title.

I was reminded of a scene in Kathryn Stockett’s book, The Help. An interesting read from any perspective, it is even more so when you employ household staff and live in a place that does have separate bathrooms for "domestics."  In the story, The Help, there is a character who works as a maid and asks her employers for an advance, so that she can send her son to university. They turn her down, pushing her ultimately to desperation, theft, and a prison sentence.

Though The Help is a work of fiction, it reflects many realities. And although it is set fifty or more years ago, the racial and economic –isms and inequities it highlights are still very present today. This is particularly blatant in our environment in Nairobi, where the disparity between our access to choice, resources, and options and that of the people who work around us day and night is so enormous.

Also similar to the book is the intimacy that develops from our interwoven lives. The NSA doesn’t need to tap our phones or read our emails to follow our comings and goings. They can just ask our house staff, who observes us daily and knows our every habit. Likewise, we are privy to many of the stories and problems that make up their lives.

Unlike the employer characters in The Help, we are much more willing to give our staff advances, or even financial gifts, to cover things like kids’ school tuition, driving lessons, or moving from a slum shack to something a bit better. I admit it’s a new experience for us. In Peru, household staff and guards never asked for loans. But here it is common and accepted practice for the haves to be expected to help out (or be hit up by) the have-nots.

Our housekeeper is better off than many. She and her husband have some land and a house with electricity and running water. This is largely because she is smart and thrifty. And she has worked for people like us, who pay her 2-3 times the usual salary for housekeeping. But she is still poor. And the fact that she does have a few resources makes her prey to jealous and greedy relatives, who are all too ready to exploit the notion of sharing the wealth.

So, I got her the money she needed. And I gave her the next day off, so that she could go to the various land and title offices to file her paperwork. It was the following day that she told me how having the money needed made all the difference.

Is the matter fully settled? Not at all.  But the proper wheels are in motion, and this week’s hope has replaced last week’s desperation.

I read a lot about giving and development. Which strategies work best? There’s lots of discussion and little agreement. What is the right balance between accountability and just giving people money? Is direct payment better than services, microcredit better than macro-changes, teaching to fish better than giving a fish?  The jury is out and debates continue.

One thing is sure. Sometimes, you have a chance to do something relatively small for one person that represents something really big to them. May we all understand and seize that chance.