Another way to attack poverty here is for longer term residents to hire locals – as maids, gardeners, drivers, cooks, whatever. Yes, you can drive yourself, but if you can afford a car and driver, then you’ll have a more relaxing ride, plus you’ll be employing someone who will in turn feed a family or extended family. You can do your own cooking and cleaning, sure, but if you can afford to hire someone, then that person will be able to put their children through school, possibly college.
It’s another way of giving back.
There’s no such thing as welfare here. Unemployment insurance – the local equivalent, anyway y- is just being introduced, and on a very limited basis with a fairly rigorous set of demands to fulfill before one qualifies for it. If someone loses their job, if they have no savings – and many people here don’t – then they have to rely on their family, friends, or neighbors to see them through their hard times.
By hiring them, we can help.
This doesn’t mean that you should pay more than the going rate – be generous! In fact, you should not. And there are several reasons for this.
When you pay more than the going rate, you’re contributing to the white man’s tax. That doubling, tripling, or more of the prices the rest of us foreigners have to pay here over and above what the locals pay. Some of us live here. Permanently. and when you do that, you make it worse for us.
You feed into the sense of entitlement. White people are rich, therefore we owe them. It’s not true, but that’s how many locals see it.
You disturb the local economy. When prices rise too rapidly, people at the bottom of the food chain become poorer and poorer. Not good. A small, steady rate of inflation is much healthier.
You’re contributing to the "screw the white person" mentality. It’s a bit of a game here, to see how badly they can screw us. Because we’re rich, and we can afford it, and why shouldn’t they? And they get angry when it doesn’t work as well as they’d like it to.
I’m not saying all locals are like this – they aren’t. But enough are, and they’re in the majority, that it has to be taken into consideration.
