lilly.

We have now been a month in our new flat, which means we’ve been a month with our house helper, Lilly.

There are really no words to adequately describe Lilly.  She burst into my home and into my life mid-November with the announcement that she wanted to work for me, and now she appears to be a permanent fixture here.  One who brings mingled joy and exasperation, but who is rarely far from my thoughts.

Lilly’s husband died a year ago from kidney failure, leaving behind a wife, seven children and five thousand dollars in hospital bills.

Lilly works two part-time jobs as a maid–for us and for our next-door neighbors, for whom she has worked sixteen years.  We both pay her well, but with debts hanging around and eight mouths to feed and school fees to pay and a house the size of my kitchen to maintain, Lilly is almost destitute.

She comes to our flat at 11:00 a.m. six days a week, and stays until 1:00 or until her work is done.  On her first day of work, I made my kids their customary peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and sat at the table as they ate lunch.  Afterwards they jumped down to play, and I started to clean up, brushing together their bread crusts and crumbs and crumpled napkins.

Lilly walked by and said, “Don’t throw away.”  I looked at her blankly, “Don’t throw what away?” “Leftovers.  Don’t throw away.  I will take for my babies.”  I was aghast. “No way.  Your kids are not eating my kids’ leftovers.”  I jumped up and tried to give her a loaf of bread from the kitchen. “No.” She pushed it away. “Just leftovers.  Save for me.  No wasting.”

After she left that afternoon with our uneaten sandwich scraps wrapped in a napkin, I sat at the dining room table and cried.

It is hard to have a poor person in your home every day.

It is hard to have someone reach over your shoulder and pull a mealy apple out of your garbage can, or scold you for the bread ends you toss away without a second thought.  It’s hard to have someone take out your trash every day in order to re-open the bag and look through it.

Yes, Lilly does that.  It is a common fact of life here that poor people dig through the trash to take what they want or need.  It happened at our last apartment, and it happens here, and no matter how much I try to set aside things I think Lilly will want (and how can I possibly know what those things are when it’s my garbage?), she will still systematically look through our trash.

It is hard to see the sharp line of Lilly’s dark cheekbones and the way her sari blouse sags around her ribcage when it should be fitted snug.

It is hard that she cooks us delicious, piping hot South Asian lunches, and refuses to take some for herself until we have eaten.  It’s hard to walk into my kitchen and see her sitting cross-legged on the floor to eat the lunch my children didn’t finish.

It is a weight that sits on my shoulders and tugs at the back of my throat and pricks my eyes when I lie in bed at night.

But Lilly is a fighter.  She is tough as nails and one of the hardest workers I know, and she will not let anyone rest until she successfully puts her seven kids–five boys and two girls–through school.  I know this because I listen to her talk about it every single day.

I’m a mother too, after all.  I am in awe of the odds that are stacked against this tiny, wiry, 40-something-year-old woman, and I am even more in awe of her steel-willed determination to give her kids a better life than she’s had.

I respect the way she’s changing me, teaching me to waste less, to think more of people in need, shattering my ugly stereotypes that she will try to take advantage of us.   I marvel over the mouth-watering meals she whips up for us with a smile and am touched when, with all the burdens weighing on her heart, she thinks to phone me to say she’s at the market, do we need any vegetables?

She has already become very dear.