servants

“Where are our shopping bags?“

“Oh, they keep them until we come back and get them“

“We get them“ meant in this shopping centre in Karachi in this case that we would come back and someone from the mall would carry our bags to the car where he'd get some rupees for this “favour“.


While this was absolutely new for me, who was used to carrying all her stuff herself, I found these “porters“, “servants“ and “helpers“ in a lot of places and forms. There are the ones that are well known to europeans: waiters, garden keepers and women who come to help in the household with tidying up and cleaning (the german (oh, well...mostly not originally from Germany....) „Putzfrau“ might be known to most of the people). But there's still something else, a trait that I'm not so used to. People who can be called when you're in need of a favour (buying a new phone-credit-card and you're too buisy watching TV to go out, for example), or coming to cook for you, washing your clothes, giving massages or just coming to carrying the garbage out. Some of these persons are even closer attached to the household as they sometimes even live in the same place and take care of the house and its facilities. By this they mostly don't have the same status as the people they're working for and mostly wouldn't eat together with them (quite interesting how meals and food can segregate different stages of who is close to someone or status equal, higher or unequal...).

When I spoke to a lahori couchsurfing member once, he confessed that he doesn't even get up to get a cold water from the kitchen. „Why should I stand up if I can ask the servant to get it?“ he asked. „Pakistani people are lazy. They know where to spend their energy on and what not.“ (although I wouldn't sign them being lazy as I have seen them working very hard, I can at least understand the statement that I heard from others aswell: why spend energy on something, get sweaty or absorbed in little things while you have to care for other, far more important things...?).


I'm still unsure how to see the whole case. Is it just an extended service sector that uses the people's resources differently? Is it modern slavery, as you let others wok for yourself (or do you always let others work for you while you would never call it like that?)? Or does it always depend how you treat the people while they're doing “a favour“ for you?