Making Compromises

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A westerner who wants to live in a Middle Eastern country has to be willing to make compromises. Some of these compromises are about fitting in with local customs but others are about fitting in with your fellow expatriates. As I learned on my first stint in the region, in Beirut, it sometimes takes considerable ingenuity to devise a suitable compromise.


When Sue and I arrived in Beirut, we quickly rented a small apartment in the city center.

The next day our employer asked us when he should tell our maid to come to start work. The maid in question had worked for our predecessors at the school and he assured us that she was totally reliable. (I can’t remember the woman’s name now but I’ll call her Khadija.)

Sue and I were both from working-class backgrounds and had political views that did not encompass the hiring of maids! So we told our boss that we weren’t going to have a maid. But all expatriates have a maid, he told us. They don’t cost much and they make life much more pleasant. We repeated that we were not going to employ one and that that was that.

The next day our boss approached us again. He said he had explained the situation to Khadija and that she was very upset. She had a young daughter and she worked as a maid in order to pay for her daughter’s education. If we didn’t employ her, her daughter would have to stop attending school.

As you can imagine, Sue and I felt terrible when we heard this and, after a little soul-searching, we agreed to hire Khadija. However, we weren’t willing to totally abandon our principles. So we decided to hire her for half-a-day a week and to pay her the same hourly rate that we were being paid as teachers.

Khadija started work. As she did a great job and was a very nice person, everything seemed to have worked out well.

No such luck! After a few days the director asked to see us again. The other teachers were unhappy with us, he said, because we were paying Khadija double the going rate. Our colleagues’ maids would soon hear about this and it was bound to cause ill feeling. We had to cut her pay to match what everyone else paid. No way, we replied. You really have to do this, he countered. We were adamant.

In the end we worked out an ingenious solution. We would pay Khadija for a full day’s work every week at the going rate. However, we would always let her go home after working only half-a-day. So her official rate of pay was the same as that of the other maids but in reality she received the same hourly rate as we were paid.

It was the first of many compromises that we had to make in Beirut and, later, in Libya. I think it was one of the better ones, though.
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