giving food?

carlaeb

I don't want to get into the details of this, but I made a major faux pas today. I'll talk more about it later if it seems relevant, but in short, what I want to know is how I can provide food to a family without them feeling like I'm giving charity. It is a young mother and two daughters. The mother is a maid, very friendly and hard working. They get dinner every day, but that is it and they cannot cook at home. They live right nextdoor to me. ONce in a while, I can just invite them over to as guests, but I'm trying to come up with something more regular. I'd like to just take them grocery shopping once a week or let her kids come over each morning for breakfast, but the mother has some pride of course. What do you think?

What if I hire her as a part time cook? I don't want a cook, but I could hire her to cook twice a week (that would be convenient for me). Would it then be appropriate for her little girls to eat breakfast at my place each morning and let the mother take some food home? Or should I just give her daughters some fruit and milk and bread and that sort of thing every day without saying much about it?

Has anyone done anything like this before?

shashank.aggarwal

well, hiring her as a cook seems to be a good Idea. Maybe hire her for cooking lunch daily.

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karuna

I'm having the same crisis. Well, a similar one. Some road breakers have set up camp near my place in Delhi. Mum, dad, three boys. In the course of parking the car (damn narrow streets!) I got into conversation with them. Well, sign-language and grinning, my Indian friends did the talking. They helped us out finding a safe space to put the car.

They live under a dusty blue tarpaulin.

I came back out later and handed the kids sweets I'd brought from the UK, which were snatched with huge smiles. I'd like to give them something better, but I'm worried it might look too much like charity. I'm thinking perhaps I could invite myself over to their tent with "gifts"? Under the pretext of a thank you for their help?

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birds

This is one of the typical living-in-India-dilemmas. Whatever you do try to 'teach them how to fish' rather than 'supply them with fish'.

Of course in the short term supplying fish is fine, especially to kids, but if you want to really change their lives you have to set up something that allows them long term benefits.

Employment is a good start but makes sure they learn something useful, just cleaning or cooking is not enough. Try to teach them Western cooking which is a great skill to have for a maid, or teach the kids English, or if they are bigger but teach typing (we use a computer programme for this). Basically anything that will teach them something which will set them apart from the masses and they can leverage once you are gone.

Great you are getting involved

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AprilFlower

I think it is pretty easy as far as kids are concerned to feed them almost anytime, especially snack stuff. Keep bananas and other fruit (preferably high calorie stuff) as well as something like glucose biscuits and encourage them to come visit you often. If you don't know Hindi (or whatever the local language is) ask them to teach you a few words and then you can teach them in english.

It's great if you can teach the mother to cook western food and if she doesn't know english then work on teaching her that too. That will let her earn more in the long run.

If the cooking thing is really not convenient for you another option is that you can ask if she or her daughters could come and do your dishes/sweep/clean the toilet(not sure about the age of the girls but often they start working at a very early age). Then give them food. Pretty normal to feed servants and you can just give extra large quanities so whoever comes will be able to take home to the others.

karuna

Couldn't teach the kids I want to help to cook if I wanted to. They don't have a kitchen.
Any ideas?

SueJ

One thing that may be worth considering is if you can acquire a hand-operated sewing machine and then pass it on 'as you don't need it any more'. If you can pass on skills of how to use it then you are definitely teaching them to fish.

livinhimalayas

You could employ her to cook as oyu suggest and make her cook a bigger meal than you would eat and give teh 'left overs' to her, she thinks she is doing you a favour by taking away the left overs so you don;t eat stale food and you have found a way to give her food regularly without embarrassing her. I do this too.

Bird, my regards to you for doing a great service by empowering the kids rather than just giving handout.

Nick-H

Carla, you mention that you mad a faux pas already: did you offer charity and have it refused? I find the sensitivity about accepting money that plagues us Westerners is usually lacking in the more down-to-earth Indian attitudes.

It is usual for anything that is not wanted from our kitchen to be be given to our maid. If it is not good enough to give to a human, my wife insists that it goes to cows or dogs. Such is her insistence that nothing be wasted, waste is the real sin in India!

birds

I love that about India. This also makes that everything can be repaired no matter how insignificant. I really like the guys you see on the roadside and who make zippers or repair spokes of umbrellas

It is a great attitude which will go a long way if they keep it up.



Thanks Livinhimalayas!

AprilFlower

Karuna, I think your case is perhaps slightly different. When you say road breakers are you talking about road construction workers? I have to admit I have great admiration for the construction crews here. Terribly hard work and yet they aren't out begging. Makes me have faith in humanity.

At any rate, since there are boys involved...do you have any type of garden area or porch etc? If you do then you could ask them to do some gardening/watering. Clean your patio area daily. I don't think cooking would be a really good fit. You might use them as errand boys and then give them a bit of a tip. Send them to the store to buy some groceries or pick up your laundry. (Make sure you start by giving them a really small amount of money, you never know they might just run off. So maybe don't send them to pay your electric bill in the beginning:-). Do the boys go to school or do they work? A lot depends on their parents attitude and what they are already doing.
Not everyone wants a "better" life. So just be sure that the parents are on board with the ideas, whatever they maybe. The beauty of having boys is that they won't have to spend whatever they have on wedding arrangements .
I remember watching a documentary about a photographer who went into the slums (Calcutta or maybe Mumbai) and taught several of the children how to be photographers. She also went to extreme efforts to put them in school. There were perhaps 12-15 kids but only 2 or 3 of them really ended up with a different life after a few years. Some of the girls were made to drop out of school by their parents/family and eventually became prostitutes. A few stayed in school. One of the boys won a photography prize and was flown to (Amsterday?) a western country to meet with other child photographers. He said it really changed his life.
The point being, sometimes our best is just not enough for somebody else.

Nick-H

I think so too. These people are earning, and whilst they probably do not earn much, I'm sure they will be feeding their families.

karuna

Carlaeb says the woman she's talking about is a maid. So is she not also working? I'm confused on that point. Also she is feeding her family- they get dinner. Can't imagine my lot are doing much better than that.

I posted here as it seemed daft to have two threads on a similar issue; I'd been wanting to discuss this for a while.

I'm not here long enough to do anything significant and I don't think I'd want to anyway- I've certainly no illusions about changing anyone's life. I just want to know the best way to give something without it seeming like charity. My friends here suggest milk, but I see that as kind of insulting- it's a basic staple food, that looks like charity to me!

Perhaps the answer is to do nothing. But they've helped us more than once for nothing, are friendly and polite, and are in far far worse circumstances than me or anyone I know.

Perhaps I can give the boys some errands now and then while I'm here. If I can get them to understand! So difficult.

Nick-H

That sounds like a very good idea.

Here in Chennai we don't seem to see families working on the roads like we used to: big machines have taken their place. I really don't know if that is a good or bad thing

I don't know if your road workers would be itinerant. If they are based in one place, then the best thing one can buy a child is an education --- but that requires substantial assistance from a trustworthy local person through whom to channel the regular contributions; not a simple thing for a visitor to set up.

carlaeb

Thanks for the responses. You've given me a lot to think about. I'll write more later when I have an Internet connection that is not painfully slow.