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The Role of Household Workers in Pakistan

The document discusses the author's household employees, which include two maids, two drivers, and a kitchen boy. It notes that having household help is very common in their culture and society. The employees take care of tasks like cleaning, laundry, cooking, childcare, and driving that would otherwise fall to the mother or other family members. Shadowing one of the maids, the author observes her morning routine of collecting and washing laundry, then sweeping and mopping floors while the kitchen boy cleans other surfaces.

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4 views1 page

The Role of Household Workers in Pakistan

The document discusses the author's household employees, which include two maids, two drivers, and a kitchen boy. It notes that having household help is very common in their culture and society. The employees take care of tasks like cleaning, laundry, cooking, childcare, and driving that would otherwise fall to the mother or other family members. Shadowing one of the maids, the author observes her morning routine of collecting and washing laundry, then sweeping and mopping floors while the kitchen boy cleans other surfaces.

Uploaded by

zo
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© All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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English Assignment (5.

2)
In this day and age, many educational opportunities have opened up so people may think that
the working class has gone out of recognition. It hasn’t disappeared however. Especially not in
this society. Almost every household has at least one if not more servants. Drivers, housemaids,
kitchen workers and chefs. Our household itself has two maids, two drivers and a kitchen-boy
working for us.

It is a very popular concept, one that has been rooted so deep into our culture that you have
trouble tracing it back to the beginning. It may seem odd to people who do not have much
exposure to the concept of having people work for you doing all the daily chores. They might
refer to it as absurd or something not required. But, we have become so dependent on these
people working for us that it is a struggle to live without them.

Services like this in Pakistan are not as costly as they might be abroad. So one might think of it
as a useless expenditure. But nevertheless our dependency on them has increased in the recent
years.

They do all the jobs in the household that typically the mother would do or the kids would help
out with. Cleaning, laundry, dusting, washing the dishes, driving us places, managing the
kitchen, maintaining the garden and doing errands. Because there are so many working
mothers now, it is hard for them to manage all these things. I sometimes wonder what our life
would be like without them and how hard it would be to manage without them.

I do take care of my own chores, such as making my bed, keeping my room clean, dusting my
personal library, and keeping my workspace clean. But things such as laundry for a family of six
and washing dishes and keeping a two story house clean on a daily basis is something I could
never imagine myself doing.

As a result, this shadowing project allows me to see what they truly go through, one thing that I
do not pay attention to as I go about my own day.

I chose my maid as the person I would shadow. She had been working with us for about two
years, so I would say she is quite familiar with the pattern of activities that revolve around this
household. She comes in at about 10 in the morning and collects the laundry from all the rooms
in the house and sets about washing and hanging them up to dry. The process is quite
strenuous, wringing out all those clothes. She’s usually done about 11-12am and then takes a
break before sweeping and mopping the floors while our kitchen-boy dusts the consoles and
desks and tables. She alternates between the two floors of the house every day. The rest of the
housework is done by the kitchen-boy who also takes care of errands around the house.

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