Compound Life

I was working away happily when the Internet suddenly went out. With a mild annoyance, I went to the wireless router in back of the house figuring there was once again some issue with the service.

As I did, the teenage gardener kid who was having his mid-day meal, saw me and called to Nengah, our housekeeper. Nengah came dashing out of the staff quarters behind the house.

Nengah knew exactly why I was back there and explained that our electricity grid went out and that everyone in the area was without electricity. He figured the electric company would have it up in about an hour.

Then as I returned to the house, he followed me in to show me that the propane tank for the kitchen burner had run out. Then he proceeded to replace the water bottle in the cooler and several other household tasks.

Having a housekeeper is fantastic in so many ways. Mostly.

No one’s complaining. Certainly not Emily when Nengah brings her morning pot of Bali coffee nor me when I look out each morning at our perfectly manicured gardens. That said, one of the strangest parts of our life in Bali is a staffed house and compound.

Despite people’s common reaction that it wouldn’t be difficult for them to get used to having someone cook and clean for them – it kinda’ is.

In 2004, when I decided to move to Bali and began shopping for houses to rent, I didn’t know very much about what I would find, what it would cost and how it worked. I quickly discovered that most of the houses I looked at came with staff. Some had just a housekeeper, others like this one, had housekeepers and gardeners.

I chose my house because I loved it, not because of the staff. In fact, I never really considered what it would be like to have staff or what it would mean. The first day Nengah and his younger cousin Ketut who was the gardener, were sitting around, waiting to see what I might need.

It was strange. The fact that we couldn’t communicate since neither one of them spoke a word of English and I had nothing more than “terima kasih” (thank you), made it stranger.

I didn’t know what they wanted from me any more than I knew what I wanted from them. I quickly discovered that Nengah was new at his job and really didn’t know how to do too much. So, we learned how to be resident and housekeeper together and shared many, many awkward moments.

It didn’t take me long to be weirded out by Nengah’s coming and going into my house – in the rear servants’ entrance and out the front and sometimes the reverse. Occasionally, he just cut through the living room on his way across the compound.

When my friend Chad arrived to join me in our foreign nurse recruiting venture, he initially lived in the downstairs bedroom. Chad became preoccupied by the fact that there was an entire set of people living and working around us who we didn’t know. While my reaction was to just do my thing and try not to get too involved, Chad wanted to understand everything.

“There’s a lot going on in this compound…I want to know what these people are doing! Look at that, look – they live under the gazebo…”

Indeed they did. At that time, there were two bedrooms below the dining gazebo where Nengah and Ketut slept. The next year, the owner of the property built a larger staff house in the large yard behind my house and turned the rooms under the gazebo into a staff kitchen. But we had people sleeping under a gazebo – which was a real mind bender.

In his investigations, Chad discovered that the staff got paid 100,000 rupiah ($10) per month plus housing, rice and occasional other food. Renters were also expected to tip staff. Chad and I decided that a 250,000 rupiah tip would be well appreciated and that it would probably benefit us to always pay more than the owner. Later, as I made more money and reevaluated the situation, the tips got larger. Even though Bali is – and was even more so then – so cheap to live, $10 a month seemed ridiculous.

We also learned that Ketut, our gardener was 14 years-old and had never been to school a day in his life. His family couldn’t afford it. Nengah had been to school for one year as a child. Not only were they cousins, but the housekeeper in the neighboring house was also their cousin. In fact, their entire family worked for the owner in his various houses and properties. It was like the owner of the house had serfs.

This was a lot to absorb.

Our neighbors were an Indonesian-Dutch couple. The 26 year-old Indonesian girl ordered her housekeeper around all day – calling for her constantly. The owner of the compound came around and ordered the staff around too. Later, when he decided to live in the house next to us for a few months when it was between tenants, he and his family ordered the staff around constantly – and even brought a housekeeper from another house with them. Nengah was always running over there to pitch in.

I didn’t like this approach to having staff and decided a daily routine would be ideal. I asked Nengah to make breakfast and clean the house in the morning and make dinner and close the upstairs windows at night. He worked about two hours in the morning and one to two at night. Whatever else he did with his day, I didn’t care and didn’t want to know. I always got my own lunch. His late mornings and afternoons were his. He sometimes went out on weekend evenings too. It felt better that way.

As much as I have always loved the compound, the house, Bali and the lifestyle here – the staff have always presented a moral quandary. There’s an uncomfortable aspect to paying someone less in a month than most people at home make in a day – even though I know Nengah makes several times market wage.

I often felt a little like a colonialist. I had the big house on beautiful property and the locals worked for me while I was a guest in their land.

When Emily arrived, she also struggled with it at first. It’s strange to have someone walk in and out of the house. She didn’t really like that the kitchen isn’t really for us to use. It’s Nengah’s kitchen. He cooks in it, organizes it his way and if he discovers that we used it – even for something small like making coffee – he feels badly, like he didn’t do his job.

One day, Emily wanted to use the kitchen. She felt like we have a house and should take advantage of the option to cook for ourselves. She made nasi goreng – Indonesian fried rice. She didn’t get too far into it before Nengah was standing by her side, feeling badly, insisting on doing it. When she explained that she wanted to cook, he remained there, cutting vegetables, helping her and giving her tips. As soon as we served it, he began washing the pan and utensils.

The house isn’t fully ours. Just like the yard has more people walking through it in a day than there are residents in the houses. There’s Nengah, the housekeeper next door, the one for the house across the compound, the gardener kid, the guy from the stone carving shop on the next property who does security at night, one housekeeper’s daughter, and another girl who helps out around the compound. It’s their home too.

In the past, the house across the compound went through a lot of housekeepers because each one was an 18-21 year-old girl who eventually had her boyfriend hanging around and not long after that announced she was pregnant and getting married. One of them returned – I remember when she left because she was pregnant six years ago and now she’s the one with the little kid who hangs out around the compound sometimes.

Sometimes repairmen come and go. The pool man as well. The owner has made changes and renovations to the property over the years which mean construction workers and delivery men pass through. During the time I lived here, they put in a pond and fountain, took out the fountain, added fish, took away fish, put in a new fountain, added new fish and then took away the fish again. No one ever told me it was coming or why. It was one of the excitements of compound life.

Emily and I close the curtains to the living room each night and open them as a signal to Nengah that we’re up and ready for coffee and breakfast. Sometimes we open them and a different staff member is sweeping the leaves and flower petals from our yard or blessing our house. We never really know who and what we’ll find at any given time.

Over the years, I’ve just chalked it up to life in Bali. We try to treat people with respect and consideration including paying them a good wage. We think of them as people with a job to do and lives of their own. There’s no getting around the fact that the tremendous power distance is uncomfortable. But as I said – time, when dinner is waiting for us on the gazebo overlooking the rice terraces – we’re not complaining.

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