I still can’t get over the fact that my family has a maid. At first, I took the weirdness just to be a cultural difference. But, it’s been almost two weeks now, and I still find myself constantly thinking about it. The maid is one of the nicest people I’ve ever met, and often when I come back from classes around 7, I’ll hang out in the kitchen with her while she irons or cooks, or prepares something or other. It turns out that she started working when she was 12. Her mother died when she was very young and she went to live with her grandmother so she could go to school. However, school was really hard for her, and her grandmother didn’t read or write so she had no one to go to for help. After a while, she couldn’t stand the embarrassment of school and so… she dropped out and started working. She told me that what she really hopes to do one day is to move back to her home village and have a nice house and some time to herself. Right now she lives about 2 miles away on a road that most cars can't even drive and in a house without running water. And this is the home of a woman that works 12-13 hours a day!

While my parents treat her very kindly, the still establish definite boundaries that creates a distance between them. For example, we generally eat our meals on the dining room table, and the maid and her kids never sit with us. They always eat on stools in the kitchen.

I know that the United States is filled with inequalities, but I’ve never experienced them glaring at me everyday.