A sad but happy ending today. How can that be? My dearest caregiver who has been with me since I left the hospital has left our home. We could not give her the hours that she needed from her agency. It is sad to say goodbye to someone who has taken care of you and your home while you are ill. I remember how much of the day I spent in bed and how I held on tight to her hands and looked so deep in her eyes while my nurse painfully ripped the dressing off of my hip wound. I looked as though searching for something that would make the pain go and I find it in her smile.
We found out a lot about our lives, our families, and our different cultures- she, Phillipina, and I, Americana. I felt fortunate to have traveled to her country before so I had a visual of the sights, sounds, and tastes that she described.
A daughter of a farmer, she went to school to become a midwife. She stopped delivering babies when the New People's Army would try to recruit her when she arrived at the doorstep of what she thought would be her next patient.
From there her first trip away from home would be to work in a military hospital in Saudi Arabia. This is where I felt she grew up.
She called her Mother to find out how to wash her clothes. Her meals, and apartment were all paid for by the Saudis, and she worked there for 17 years rarely venturing out in her barka with other females to shop. She earned enough money to send home to buy two homes. But her two sons were being raised by her husband in America. With the danger of the Gulf War so close, her family begged her to come to the USA. She arrived to find her babies grown teenagers and now married men who have given her 3 grandchildren.
She misses Saudi life -unlike here there were no cell phone bills, no insurance to pay, no mortgages. I can't convince her that the trade off is well worth it- the freedom of walking down the street alone without men whipping your ankles if you show your hair. That freedom alone is worth the price I pay to live in the USA. My ideals, of course, are not shared by all.
She says she will retire in the country where she grew up in the Phillipines but I am sure that by the time she goes back there will be no country and all that she knew and experienced will be much different. But I don't dare pop her bubble.
I also know that many broken families are the result of a country that has over 10% of its population working overseas just to make ends meet. They come here as doctors, lawyers, architects, and work at cashiers, customer reps and caregivers. Our minimum wage here is a week's salary over there so who can blame them?
It just seems so sad as they work and send money home from minimum wage jobs here to become multimillionaires over there. In a couple of years they could stop working and live the good life at home- but they don't. They dream about it, but they really never go back because their kids, grandkids, lovers, and spouses, and friends are now all here. They are now all as I, an American.