Things go missing when you live in a house with people. Things get misplaced, moved around, stashed away and forgotten about. Things fall in the cracks between the sofa cushions and behind bookcases. Sometimes they are little things that have not even been missed until they are found. Other times they are bigger things, more important in the daily rituals of life and their absence becomes an inconvenience.
Occasionally it's hard to tell what is missing. The rice goes faster than you thought it should or the milk is consumed at an impossible rate. You may have small ideas about what is happening in these cases, but it's not nice to think so and the suspicions get pushed to the back of mind where they mingle with doubt and no proof and remain an uncertainty.
Too many hands. It's a saying I employ often when searching for my missing things. Too many little kid hands that like to pick up small objects and fiddle with them absentmindedly while doing something else. Too many hands sharing the same electronics and chargers and forgetting to return them to a communal place. Too many hands cleaning and moving and touching objects that might appear to be out of use or unimportant.
It's part of learning to live in a full house, or a halfway full house or even just with one other. It's one of those small perks of living alone- everything is exactly where you put it the night before. Or the week before.
Ex-pats in Kinshasa tend to have cleaning help, however, so even living alone doesn't ensure you will find things where you left them. We have someone who comes in everyday to clean up and wash clothes, though I have tried many times to help her find other work. We simply don't need someone everyday. And I am intensely private. I have not quite found a way to feel comfortable going about my daily affairs, or even worse, sitting doing nothing but breathing in the fresh jungle air, while someone cleans around me. Perhaps it is due to the fact that I hate cleaning around people who are enjoying their leisure time. I want them to get up and help me so we can finish faster and we can all relax. Sometimes I think having household help is something you need to grow up with in order to be truly comfortable with. Sometimes I think it is just me.
But then I talk to friends and colleagues and hear that they also have odd feeling moments. One friend shared with me a moment when she was sitting down to eat a taco lunch. A meal that requires small mounds of food from different dishes to be piled high upon the plate. A meal that could look lavish to someone struggling to feed their family every night. And that's where the real discomfort comes in. Conducting a rich and bountiful life in front of someone who just doesn't have.
I have been in this service position most of my life, working in restaurants, watching weddings and parties and gala affairs from the sidelines. In a job, you tend to understand the boundaries and stick to them. You know exactly what your role is and it is easy enough to maneuver about within it, marveling at the extravaganza of those you are serving.
But when it is brought into the home, it seems ever more personal. I tend to have a much harder time with the boundaries when I am on the other side. A lot of it also has to do with African cultures and the strict roles of age, gender, and economic status that command respect. I am constantly wavering between my ideas and crossing the boundaries and not enforcing the rules based on my American ideals and half-formed thoughts about how things should be.
It just leads to trouble. The rules are in place to ensure that everyone is on the same page. If I try working from my American page, it doesn't seem to translate well. I have been learning this lesson for awhile now and yet, still can't quite absorb it. I see how it goes wrong, but I don't have the mannerisms to work on that other field, even if I am slowly coming to appreciate it.
It's the one where the youth do whatever their elders ask, even if elder only means a few years. And the employee completes all the required tasks. Perhaps I am just not a good employer. I hate asking for "extra" things and constantly feel bad if I think I am creating too much work (while at the same time realizing that there is barely enough work in my house to employ someone for an entire day, every day. Oh, I am complicated.)
Because of my complications, I have been with the same woman for 5 years. I have gone to her house, met her family and bought them extra food occasionally. I give her all of the clothes the kids have outgrown and all of the things I no longer wear. I've made small loans and gifts of money even when it was a hardship for my family. It's never really enough because lifting someone out of poverty is no easy task. But I have kept her employed, at times employed her sister and in general tried to make life a little less stressful.
The fact is, I am not really one of those ex-pats that lives an easy carefree life full of travel to exotic places and lavish luxuries (well, compared to the normal Westerner. I understand my life is probably lavish to the average Congolese houseworker.)
It's a distortion which can never truly be understood. Even if my cupboards are frequently bare and nothing I own here is really mine (a perk of working for an international school, all the basics are provided from housing to furniture to car rental.) She will never see the struggles I feel. She cannot see.
All that to say, things are missing and this time I can't quite push it back to the dusty corner of doubt and uncertainty. I know where they've gone. What I don't know is what to do about it.
There is the nagging thought that, well, we weren't using that, or I would have given it to her anyway, or even more preposterous, Mobutu himself proclaimed it was ok to take a little bit from those who have if you happen to be one of those who have not.
These all seem like excuses to me when I really want to demand complete honesty and total trust. Not to mention the feelings of hurt and betrayal, the sense of loss of respect that comes when someone has taken from you.
I know that in any other house, immediate dismissal would be the response. But we have spent five years together. Five years erasing the boundaries that are supposed to prevent this from happening. And there is always the family to consider. Small children who depend on me paying someone to come in and do things for me that I am entirely capable of doing for myself.
Except the one thing I seem to have the most trouble doing- maintaining the boundaries and keeping things from going missing.
