Jeddah, January 25: Saudi households claim their private affairs are being made public by their own domestic workers such as maids and drivers.
They said inevitably their friends and relatives find out about what goes on in their private lives.
Some of these workers gossip about what goes on in their households to friends and family working in the households of neighbors or other relatives. Some of them go further and use such secrets as a blackmail weapon.
Some Saudi families refuse to take their housemaids with them when they go out to visit friends or relatives. However, sometimes it is not possible to do this on certain occasions.
Speaking to Arab News, some Saudi families said they resorted to various techniques to keep their secrets away from their housemaids and drivers but admitted they were not always successful.
They explained that they protected their privacy by not discussing their private issues in the presence of the housemaids. They said when there were differences among them they would go to other rooms to settle them. Others would ask the maid to do her chores and go to her room immediately after that. Other families prefer to hire non-Arabic speaking maids so they would not be able to understand private discussions and at the same time improve their children’s command of English.
These methods have not always proven successful. No matter how hard the families might try, they have not been able to prevent their housemaids from mixing with other maids and reveal many of their secrets.
The families are also not safe from the curiosity of their own friends and relatives. There are inevitably times when they cannot restrain their anger, keep their voices low or lock themselves in other rooms to discuss their differences.
Wafa Faisal, a working Saudi woman with four children aged between five and 16, said she suffered a lot at the hands of relatives who used her housemaid to find out about her family’s private affairs.
Faisal, who lives in Jeddah, said she often goes to Taif to visit her mother who is living there. She recalled once during a school mid-year vacation, her mother asked her to visit her with the children. She said she had to apologize because she had minor marital problems that she needed to resolve first.
“When I went to Taif a month later to attend my sister’s graduation ceremony, my mother surprised me by claiming my husband beat me and prevented me from visiting her. She said other things that weren’t true. I knew it was my housemaid who told her this,” she said.
Wafa said she refuted all her mother’s claims. She, however, conceded that she was having some problems with her husband at the time but that was it. She said she asked her mother not to listen to the housemaid and to get the news right from her mouth.
Abu Saud, a Saudi man in his 60s, said he was going to the mosque for Fajr prayer one day when his neighbor stopped him to ask about the health of his daughter. He said his daughter was not seriously ill but he had to take her to the hospital because her temperature was a little bit high. “When I asked my neighbor how he found out about my daughter, he told me my housemaid confided in him,” he said.
Umm Khaled, a Saudi housewife, said a lot of details about her personal life were leaked to her families and relatives including her inquisitive aunt, by her housemaid and driver. She recalled that she was not in the mood one day to attend a function at her mother’s house and instead took her daughter to an amusement park. “When I visited my mother a day later, my aunt asked me about my evening with my daughter at the park. I immediately knew that it was my driver who told her,” she said.
Fatima, another Saudi housewife, said she had to dismiss her housemaid because she gossiped too much to her neighbor’s maid. “I find out the neighbor knew everything which was going on in my house, including new things I bought and places I went to,” she said.
Fatima recalled one day she had a big fight with her husband who pushed her slightly and she fell down. “I was not hurt but my husband insisted on taking me to the hospital for checks. When we came back we buried our differences and had a nice time together. The next day my neighbor visited me with a gift to wish me a quick recovery. She also insisted that I divorce my husband as he had apparently beaten me. Nothing of the sort had happened but to protect myself, I dismissed my housemaid,” she said.
Saudis are known to be reserved and secretive about their private lives. However, with the presence of housemaids and drivers in their houses, this privacy is threatened. They have two options: either to get rid of their house helps or live with the fact that their dirty linen could be washed in public.