Pizza and exploitation.

Tonight I hung out with the Upretis (my refugee family) and taught them how to make pizza, which their ten-year-old daughter is obsessed with. When it was finished, she kept bringing out a piece on a plate, one at a time, cutting it in half, and insisting that I eat the other half. It was like being at a bar with someone who keeps ordering shots for you. She ate me under the table, quite easily. Relative to body weight, I'm pretty sure pre-teen girls eat the most of any species on earth.

The dad, Padma, is now working as a housekeeper at a hotel/casino in a Nevada town right across the Idaho border. He's grateful to have a job, but it's obvious he knows the situation is less than ideal. He is paid seven dollars an hour, and though they still receive certain kinds of assistance, he is basically trying to support a wife and two, soon to be three, children on that income. Most of his coworkers are from Mexico and speak in Spanish all day, which is less than helpful to his own efforts to learn English. On the upside, Padma now has a used car so he doesn't have to take the bus, which saves some time in his day. I'm glad about that for my own reasons. An Iranian refugee befriended him on the bus, and I met this character, and he worried me a little. He's pretty cynical, and his favorite phrase in English is "Oh my Gohd." It was starting to wear off on Padma and even his daughter. Maybe I'm just still too Protestant, but it bugged me.

A new refugee couple have moved in to the apartment next door, and the husband came over to visit while I was there. I would guess he is around thirty years old, and in Nepal he worked as a teacher in a private school. His accent is thick, but his English is nearly perfect. He told me something that I hope is a rare occurrence. Apparently, a couple who own a small hotel, around twenty-five rooms, came to the refugee center seeking a refugee couple to hire as live-in managers. They offered the position to him and his wife, and handed them a paper describing the duties, which were basically to clean all the rooms, do all the laundry, and man the front desk from seven in the morning until eleven at night. Every day. In return, they would have free living quarters within the hotel (obviously with the expectation that whatever a guest needed at three in the morning, they would have to take care of it) and would be paid a grand total of...wait for it...one thousand dollars a month.

I quickly do the math. Two people, working sixteen hours a day, the equivalent of thirty-two working hours, seven days a week, the pay rate works out to--a dollar an hour. Awesome. Is it legal to offer someone a job on those conditions? Why did the refugee center even let these people try to sucker someone into taking it? One thousand dollars a month for food, medical insurance, car payments and insurance, gas, etc, etc, etc.

Maybe in this economy, something is better than nothing, but honestly, it struck me as really kind of slimy and exploitative. My mom and I did a quick estimate of how much a hotel that size might gross in a month, and the figure was over $30,000. Someone who does feel desperate will probably take that job and scrape by and not complain, but doubtless they will know what kind of money they are pulling in in receipts, and how very little of it is coming back to them.

And yet. I feel like I'm an observer of the life refugees lead, and it isn't all sunshine and roses. They are dealing with learning English, some of them from scratch, looking for work with less than perfect English in a pretty rough recession, living in small and dilapidated housing, often two families to an apartment. They've left all their possessions and most of their family on the other side of the world, and don't know who they might see again or when. Still, they always tell me, ALL the time, that they like America. They even claim to like the cold weather, which I personally find difficult to believe. I know that compared to living in bamboo huts in a UN-run camp, they are moving up in the world, but from my perspective as a typical, middle-class American, I see how little they still have, in the midst of a country of almost absurd wealth, and how hard they will have to work to catch up. In a way, I love that knowing the Upretis has changed my own perspective and made me want to live in a simpler way--to own fewer clothes, eat less meat, buy fewer things brand-new. Still, I have my mental list of what I want for them--a better apartment with decent heating, a better job for Padma, a faster, more intensive way for them to learn English. Maybe these things just take time, and maybe I am impatient. The future will bring opportunities I can't foresee. Maybe I am in fact helping them toward a better future. But I always wish I could do more.