The Helpers Celebrate Christmas

Every Sunday on the above ground walkways (in Canada they call them plus 15's) helpers gather. These are the women from the Philippines, Indonesia and Nepal who work as domestics in everyone's houses. I am one of the few people I know who doesn't employ a helper. On another post I'll explain how much easier my life would be if I did, but that's much too bitter a post for Christmas.
Almost all of the helpers have Sunday off, so they gather to sit together for the day. This pictures is of early in the morning when the first ones arrive and stake out their area with flattened cardboard and picnic boxes. They bring cards to play, music to listen to and of course, cell phones. I've seen people trading manicures, women practicing dance routines, others selling plastic crafts. Walkways all over Central are full from early to late on Sundays. On the way home from shopping this Sunday I saw that under the HSBC building was packed with people. I'm going to go back and check that out another time because it looked almost big enough to be a church service.
Sunday is the days you can see how many helpers are in the city. There are church services in parks; the $10 stores are packed with shoppers; the buses back from Stanley and Repulse Bay are packed with women speaking Tagalog. But it is the walkway picnickers who intrigue me the most. This last week it was almost cool, too cool for me to want to sit on concrete all day. I remembered long days of sitting around Eugene, Oregon waiting away the day, chilly and without the money to choose to hang in a coffee shop. That was the season that lunch cost me $1.10 every day. It was fifty cents for a bun at the sandwich shop and sixty cents for a half-pint of milk. I was making about $650 a month at the office, plus money from being an artist model and from selling quilts at Saturday market. Not a lot to support two people.
The minimum wage for a full-time life-in helper now is $3783 HK. Divide that by 7.8 to get the equivalent in US dollars. There was an article in the paper last week explaining how the loss of the US dollar buying power has made it so the helpers can send much less home each month. The HK dollar is pegged to the US dollar, so their pay is worth a lot less against any of the relevant currencies. The women who were interviewed said that the change in conversion rates made it so they were sending home a lot less money. The families depend on this money, so the woman said that she doesn't eat lunch on her days off and waits to get back to her employers house to get supper.
But this Sunday, you couldn't see the falling dollar anywhere. There were boxes and boxes of foods and around the corners of every territory, piles of Christmas presents waiting to be exchanged. Merry Christmas, helpers. Happy New Year!