Emma’s True Colors

Emma is my maid. For the most part, I am incredibly thankful to have her. My dishes are cleaned every day, I no longer need to obsess over a freakishly clean apartment – it’s like a fairy comes to tidy it up every day – and my cats are taken-care of whenever I’m out of town.
Yet, Emma has recently fallen from my good graces.
Since she started, I knew that from time to time Emma would take things that I hadn’t told her were free to take. Things like peanut butter, milk, bread – nothing that I ever wanted to complain about, for to do so would be petty. And let’s face it – I must look like a millionaire compared to someone who has literally nothing. So, of course, I didn’t say anything.
I’m told I should have, as it would have possibly prevented the situation which has just arisen.
When I returned from India, I noticed that my huge tub of butter was gone. Butter is expensive in Zimbabwe. Then, one morning I sniffed my perfume on Emma. I checked the perfume bottle – it certainly looked a lot more empty than I’d left it. I started to alert myself more to other things she might have been taking. Suddenly, I noticed that other things were missing – toilet paper rolls, tea, sugar… I spoke with a neighbor for advice on what to do. She emphatically said this was a big deal, that it was an invasion of my personal space. And in fact, it did feel like exactly that – especially the perfume. What other beauty products was she using? Was she going through my cupboards?
I spoke with Emma’s boss (my neighbor and the manager of D section). He said that kind of behavior was not to be tolerated and that I should fire her. I thought that it was perhaps a big premature – maybe it was an a misunderstanding? I like to believe in the inherent goodness of people, so I simply asked me neighbor to speak with her, in Shona, so that she would understand that this behavior wasn’t ok and to clarify which items she could take and which items she couldn’t.
Later that day, after Emma had been spoken with and gone home, I was searching for my last onion. After looking everywhere without success, I went to ask my neighbor for an onion. The maid there told me that Emma had taken my onion, that she had said that I’d given it to her, as it was rotten.
Well, for whatever reason, that set me over the edge, because it meant she had lied. It could no longer be a miscommunication. Now I felt taken advantage of. Hadn’t I been generous with her, often giving her food, soap, deodorant, shoes, and gifts whenever I went away?
I decided to speak with her this morning – through the other maid, who translated. I told her that she’d lost my trust and that, in my experience, lost trust takes a long time to regain. I wanted to give her a chance, but she now was no longer allowed to take anything. I needed to begin to trust her again, and that was only going to be possible if, over a prolonged period of time, I saw that nothing was going missing in my home.
I hope she understood. I didn’t want to be like the other white bosses yelling at their black maids for the silliest of insurrections. But I also needed to be honest with myself in that, if I’m going to have someone who spends 95% of her workday at my home with me absent, I needed to trust her. And as long as she was taking my things – no matter how small – and lying to me and others, I wasn’t going to be able to trust her and I would feel uncomfortable every single day.
A difficult way to learn a difficult lesson.