The Help

... and, no, I'm not talking about the book.

We have been in New Delhi almost one week, and it's becoming apparent that we need help. We are strongly encouraged to hire a cook/housekeeper. Strongly encouraged - but not mandatory. So we thought we'd see what it was like out here before making any decisions. Last week's meals consisted of cereal and Domino's pizza. After thinking that we might starve, we decided we need help. It's not that we can't cook - its that we don't have access to the markets that we need to shop at and, if we did, we could easily get ripped off in terms of price because we're Westerners. On top of not being able to go to the markets (or even knowing where they are), we're not comfortable with the process that we need to go through for cleaning the produce. We are attempting to keep "Delhi Belly" away from us.

Luckily, our upstairs neighbors are on vacation, and we were able to hire their housekeeper for this week. This gives us time to interview other housekeepers. Hopefully, we'll have someone by next week. Today was wonderful if you don't count the fact that BOTH dogs stood in front of the housekeeper barking and were very wary of him all day. Our flat is super clean and dinner was wonderful. He even made us dessert! He must think that we eat more than we do because we have more than enough for dinner tomorrow as well. The only thing that we have to figure out is how often the cleaning needs to be done. It seems a bit ridiculous to do spring cleaning every day but we also don't know how fast the Delhi dust will accumulate. We'll figure this out as we go.

This isn't the only person we will hire. There have been two additional that we had no idea about ....
1) the trash lady. A lady shows up on her bike everyday and takes all the trash out of the three trashcans that our building has (a different color for each flat). We never even thought to question where our trash went. Well, we have to hire her because there's no other way of doing it. At least she's only $4 a month.
2) the gardener. We live in the middle flat - no roof access and no yard but we still had to have a gardener. We're not sure if this is also something we had to have or if we got bullied into it. Either way, our balcony got cleaned today and he'll be back with pretty flowering plants to put out there as well as in our driveway (whybwe're responsible for the driveway, I don't know). It will be nice to sit out there and have it looking nice. Having all the dust and pigeon poop washed off is nice.

So we'll see how this goes. I don't like the idea of having people clean up after us but our place is tidy anyway. The dust is the big problem. And it is nice to have home cooked meals again. At one point, I walked into the kitchen today and the housekeeper had various sinks and buckets full of different soaking solutions and produce. Yes, I'm quite okay leaving that to the professionals.