Lost in translation?

I am learning quite a lot from this experience of having a maid. The biggest discovery, really, has been that we can co-exist and understand each other surprisingly well, despite having come from two completely different ends of the world. I expected things to be much harder at the beginning, to be honest, having listened to so many funny and bizarre stories.  Like that story about a maid from Sri Lanka who tried to make sir's car shiny by rubbing olive oil on it. Or another one about a maid who was proposed a marriage by a young arabic male and asked to meet him on Cornish on Saturday morning. Only to then hear from him that he was not really planning to marry her, however for 10 riyals he would settle for a blow job right there and then. You might think this is the end of the shocking story, however the best part is of course, yet to come. She agreed, and asked my friend's maid to watch over her while she earned her tenner.

Compared to the above examples, my girl, who arrived only a month before she started with us, is pleasantly normal. The most weird thing I ever caught her doing was using a pan scourer on my non-stick frying pans. Really, is not a big deal, if you ask me.

She is a smart, quick learner and is incredibly observant.  Her English, which was really quite poor at first, is improving every day. Yet, it is not good enough for me to explain some things to her that we might do, that might, as I suddenly realised, make her think we are pretty weird.

The other day, for example, we went for lunch at the Pearl and my poor husband sat on a chewing gum some naughty little prat left on a chair in the cafe. Having a chewing gum smeared all over your backside is not a pleasant experience. We had to rush to a nearby shop and get him a new pair of shorts, as of course, he could not even sit back in the car in the old ones anymore.

Parents in law, who are visiting at the moment, had some experience in removing chewing gum from clothes though. Do not despair, they announced. We know what to do. We have to put the shorts in the freezer for a couple of days and then take it off with vinegar.

Now, I of course, was aware of the plan. Yet, when I opened the freezer the next morning and saw a pair of shorts sticking out, I was somehow unprepared for just how weird it looked. And so I wondered what my poor little maid might think when she finds sir's dirty shorts in the freezer. She might then proceed to do her chores only to discover an old metal clock my father in law placed in the fridge.

He wanted to check if it was accurate, you see. But to my maid, this behaviour might of course, mean something completely different. Disturbing even, perhaps. Maybe in her home country placing dirty shorts in the freezer is a first step in the virgin sacrificing ritual.

Oh, crap, I thought. I hope she does not run away from us. How to I explain to her that all this madness has, in fact, some logic behind it?

And it is not just maids vs expat families that face such bizarre misunderstandings. I remember my mother trying to sear the chicken on my then new in-laws' halogen hob. Or my mother in law getting in trouble with me for putting kitchen and dog towers in one washing load. (That just did not work for me, sorry.)

So really, it is surprising how, despite such crazy differences, we all still manage to live together. My mother grasped what was appropriate for an English family, just like my mother in law learnt what I considered weird ( No, thanks, I do not want to save the chips from my fish & chips dinner to thicken the soup the next day. ) And my Ethiopian girl will hopefully ( fingers crossed) trust me when I attempt to explain that none of the above methods are dangerous signs of us belonging to some spooky cult. We are all really pretty normal. Well, according to our own standards, of course.