Getting Settled and Finding an Ayi (helper lady)

I have been typing these in word and just haven't posted, so tonight I am going to add quite a few updates.

July 7, 2002
I have so many thoughts to share today, I should do this more often.

Tally is WALKING!!! Well, mostly she is. She will still crawl, but many times will walk across the room by herself. She stills falls quite a bit, but can finally get to a standing position from the sitting position. It won't be long before she is running, but we are happy that hopefully soon we can finally put her down a bit when we are out and about!

Adayla is busy as ever and particular as ever. She wants her clothes on as soon as she wakes up and her hair fixed. Once we moved into our place this week and I unpacked her clothes, she started wanting to change her clothes 4 times a day. This cannot happen for a few reasons, but this one being the most important: I can't keep up with the laundry if she were to do that. Thankfully our apartment does have a washer and dryer, but they are very small. It holds about 2 towels or 2 pairs of pants and 2 shirt. That is not the main problem, the dryer that holds those 2 towels then takes at least 2 ½ hours to get them close to dry. And everything must be dried all the way here because of how humid it is. Sometimes things just feel damp, even in our apartment with the A/C on. Back to Adayla and her changing her clothes all the time, we also don't have dresser with drawers or a closet. We only have an armoire sort of thing with one shelf and mostly hanging space. So I have all their clothes piled on this one shelf. Last night, she had everything in a pile on the floor with one of Tally's dresses on. Everyday we talk about how she can only pick on outfit to wear and that she must wear it the entire day. I think we are progressing.

We also have a playroom in the center of our complex for all the residents to use. It is like a McDonald's playroom with balls, tubes, and slides. The girls enjoy going there and I enjoy taking them there to wear themselves out! Tally gets around and thinks she is on of the big kids. The ball area is poor designed as they didn't enclose it with only 2 foot wall. So balls are all over the room. Yesterday we go in and Adayla starts picking them all up and putting back in the ball pit. It is a big room with lots of balls, but she managed to get them all picked up! There are also about 10 kid-sized thick plastic chairs. These also happen to get spread through out the room. She moved them one by one until they were neatly lined up.

Big accomplishments for the week:
We started our Chinese lessons again.
We found an Ayi (maid) that we like and she started yesterday.

Our tutor we found by looking on the Internet and emailing several of them. Her name is Jane. She is very nice and speaks English pretty well. Most importantly she has given us motivation to get back into our books, especiallyTim. I have asked her a lot of Chinese culture questions and how she perceives things. We will continue to make slow progress, but there have been several times over the past week where I am grateful that I can understand the little bit that I do.

As for the Ayi, we interviewed about 7. Most of them were in their 40's. They were all nice and I am sure they have plenty of experience and would have done a good job. Our main focus was that they had good Chinese and our girls would feel comfortable with her. I don't know much Mandarin, but even I can tell the difference in dialects a bit. We don't need them to watch the kids for us, but it is essential that they spend time with her by themselves so that they learn Chinese. The first one we had was recommended by a consulate family and we would have hired her, but she wanted more money then we were planning on giving her. It kind of took us by surprise and we decided to look around a bit. We looked without much success and so we were just going to hire her. I decided make one more phone call to a place to see if they had any Ayis looking for jobs. I got a few phone numbers and waited for Tim to get home so he could give them a call. He called one and she wasn't interested in being around such little kids. The next one seemed very pleasant and we set up an appointment to meet with her the next morning.

She showed up about a half hour early and surprised us that she was so young. We both really liked her. She doesn't speak any English, perfect. She had worked as an ayi for a few years. Her Chinese is excellent and she is really good at slowing down and repeating things. The young part was to her advantage as I think Adayla will take much more interest in her as she does her aunts back in the states. When Tally woke up, she asked where the bathroom was to wash her hands before she held her, she understands cleanliness, perfect. So we decided we would hire her on the condition for one month and see how it was worked out. Then we started discussing where she lived, she said I live kind of far. She had rode her bike over an hour to get to our house. We asked if this was going to be a problem, she said not at all. We will post pics of her soon with the girls.

Many of the Ayi's are from little villages in China and go specifically to the big cities to work and make more money. Our Ayi's hometown is about a 6 hour bus ride from Shanghai and it costs about $14 to get there (I would assume this is round trip). She is 21 years old and is the youngest of 3 kids. Her brother and sister both live in Shanghai where the wives work as Ayis. She is married to a guy that does some kind of labor work around Shanghai. They have a little girl who is about a month younger than Tally. His parents probably raise their girl and they go home about twice a year to see her. I cannot imagine having a baby and then seeing her only twice a year for a week or so each time. Hopefully we enable to get home more often as we will travel quite a bit and she will get quite a bit of time off.
For those interested in how much an Ayi is paid. From what we could tell in the people that we interviewed, an Enlish speaking Ayi is paid a premium. She makes nearly twice what the others do, we did not want an English speaking Ayi because this forces us to use our Chinese. They make anywhere from 8 to 20 RMB an hour, divide that by 7.6 to come up with an US$ estimate. The average hourly wage is anywhere from $1.00 to $3.00 an hour, very inexpensive for expats and many local Chinese. We pay Ayi (as the girls will call her) 2000 RMB a month for 8 hours five days a week or $265 plus we feed her. This was much better than her last job. Ayi's talk among themselves all the time to see how much they have to work and how much they get paid. I was surprised to find out how often they do this. Our first day we showed her the playroom. Another Ayi was in the room and immediately our Ayi asked her this. Of course, this was in Chinese and the other ayi worked 12 hours a day and was paid 1800 RMB a month. You also give them all the Chinese holidays off along with a week at Chinese New Year plus one month's salary as a bonus. Well we hope she works out, I am sure you will hear a lot more about her as she is now part of our family a good part of the week.