Namaste

My family has a maid. Her name is Seti and she is from Bangladesh.

For the two readers who will understand this reference, Seti kind of looks like a South Asian Elise Guinee-Cooper. For the remainder of the readers who have no idea who I'm talking about, Seti is adorable. She's about five-feet tall, wears her long, black hair in a thick braid and her upper lip is a little bit too short to cover all of her front teeth, so she has a permanent sort of rabbit-like expression on her face. More importantly, she is phenomenally sweet (with me, at least). From what little I understand, she is does not hesitate to tell my two homestay brothers to get something themselves when they ask her to get something for them.

Not being used to being waited on by one person exclusively (let's face it, the rise of the service industry in the US, and in New York particularly, proves that we are all at least somewhat used to being waited on), Seti and I have become friends. As a result, I have a really hard time letting her do everything that she is 'supposed' to do for me. That said, I do my best to do my dishes, clean my room, etc. secretively lest I jeopardize her job.

Before coming to the house, I knew that Seti had been with the family for a long time. Upon moving in, I learned that she had been in Amman for 12 years and that she was thirty. Obviously, then, she was about eighteen when she left Bangladesh for Jordan. It is also pertinent to mention that she knew no Arabic when she came here and now speaks it very well as a result of immersion only. Every day, Seti and I have breakfast and muddle through a broken-Arabish conversation with occasional Bengali lessons for me.

Nam = 'my name is'

Clearly it is not yet my time to visit Bangladesh. Anyway, the other day I gave her a big hug after a delicious meal of all sorts of meat that I'm going to pretend were all identifiable pieces of identifiable animals for the sake of my own piece of mind. Since then, she has been more candid with me and tonight, after an unfortunately long and somewhat one-sided conversation about how happy she is that I'm gaining weight so quickly, I learned that she is not only married but has a 14-year-old son. Both her husband and her son live in Bangladesh and she sees them once every year or two, if that. I can only imagine how she felt as she helped raise Nabil (now 15) and Hamoudeh (now 19).

love,

anneke