Faxineira（housemaid） in San Paulo

A bit long time ago when I was stationed in Sao Paulo as expat, leaving my family in Tokyo and living alone there, I hired faxineira (housemaid) twice a week for cleaning and laundry.

There was a kind of implicit social agreement to employ faxineira for a household which is considered “upper class”, and expats from Japan belong to this social class.

My housemaid’s name was Maria, and quality of her job was close to perfect. Also, she never had committed any kind of wrongdoing such as filching. She worked for many other Japanese expat’s family because of this trustfulness.

Remuneration for her was paid in cash every week. I hardly had chance to meet her directly, I simply put the money on the dining table, and this style of payment worked well without problem.

Without any problem? In fact, I had one small, but sometime critical problem: the means of communication with her. When I had rare chance to see her face to face, I made most of my broken Portuguese with full of body language to tell what I want her to do. However, because I am absent from my apartment for most of the time, I used written memo to communicate with her. She understood my “primitive” written Portuguese, but the issue was that her reply was hardly legible. It was written in “unique” style of handwriting alphabets, no space among the words, and sometime wrong spelling. Every time I receive her message, I needed help by my colleagues in the office to decipher the sentence.

But all in all, I owe quite a lot to Maria for enjoying my life at home in Sao Paulo. Obrigado!

My apartment in Sao Paulo. Dining room and the entrance for housemaid.