By Doreen Hammond
The recent story in the news about the molestation of a house help to the extent of burning her back with a hot pressing iron and breaking her legs was very pathetic.
It is not as if the plight of the house help has ever been good but this particular story of such inhumane treatment to someone whose job is to help the upkeep of home, defied human reasoning.
This 19 year old house help was said to have been locked in a toilet and brought out occasionally for further maltreatment. If this had happened in the days of Kunta Kinte in the film Roots, I could have believed it but in 21st century Ghana? Well, the Police are investigating and it will be interesting to know the outcome of the case.
The phenomenon of keeping house helps who used to be referred to as maidservants, maids or house girls is not a new one. It became very common when women began to take on multiple roles as home keepers, workers and breadwinners and started working outside their homes . With the gradual erosion of the extended family system which used to provide support for the nuclear family, the house help became a savior to most homes.
In addition to this , the present economic situation most families find themselves in has made the services of the house help even more necessary. The house helps take on the role of helping to care for children, washing, cooking, ironing and doing general household chores as mother and father leave their homes very early in the morning in search of money for the payment of school fees, high electricity bills, water, to buy food, clothes and pay for shelter.
In spite of the critical role house helps play in homes, their general conditions of service have remained poor. They don’t have much of a choice as to what to eat with some getting gari after pounding mounds of fufu or even sharing the meals of the dogs. To top it all up, house helps do not have the many liberties that the household enjoys yet they are expected to be the first to wake up and the last to go to bed irrespective of the fact that they have no proper sleeping places and they enjoy no medical cover.
From some village and with no idea about the people she has been brought to live with , the house help is supposed to quickly adjust , shirking off her initial psychological fear of the unknown and get down to duty.
The case of those who are old is much better than that of children who should be in school but have become house helps because of the difficult economic situations in their homes.
In the some homes their general appearance easily give them away for what they are—servants, in spite of the term house help that has been coined for them recently. Either they are wearing some over sized dresses, or you find them in an old kaba belonging to madam but with a different kind of skirt or slit which does not match. You could still argue that they are better of being in such clothes than the tattered ones they had in the village.
In verbal contracts signed with parents or their guardians, moneys may change hands but hardly is such money felt by the house help. The house help is the beast of burden. Promises of a better life and even education are often left at the very place they were made.
In homes where there are unscrupulous and henpecked masters with madams who seem a little bit on the heavy side , some of these house helps end up warming the beds of the master yet master still draws the whip at the slightest opportunity to avoid detection.
Though this situation seems to be changing, with some families putting house helps into trade and school after a stipulated period of service, how many house helps have such luck?
The country has seen the springing up of some agencies which recruit people to serve as house helps in homes. These agencies collect moneys for placing house helps not only from the employer but the house help too. She has to send a part of everything she earns to the agency. Here again it is the house help who gets fleeced of the little she makes from her toil and sweat.
These agencies give the semblance of a well organised institution. There are forms to be filled and contracts to be signed and passport pictures but the contract signed is no guarantee that a house help would stay with you till the expiration of that contract. These agencies claim to charge so much because they train the house help. But it is very difficult to tell what kind of training they get especially with house help brought from the village in the night and given away by morning.
These agencies are not able to guarantee the character of the house help because they do no background check of the house help they give away. In such cases the house help could leave the home with valuables and there will be no means to trace her.
The primary aim of these agencies therefore is not to provide service but to make moneys from both the house help and the one who hires her.
As humans, house helps cannot be said to be without their own short comings. Even with those who work on an agreed allowance, their whole attitude to work is as though they are doing a favour to their employer.
On a daily basis their duties have to be spelt out to them and they would always deliberately cut corners like sweeping only parts of a room they have been assigned to, breaking glasses and other kitchen equipment out of sheer carelessness and show a general lack of concern for items in the home because they don’t feel a part of it. Laziness and petty theft cannot be disassociated from them.
In even more serious cases, stories have been told of how house helps have abused children left in their care by even going to the extent of introducing them to sex.
Looking at the way things are going, house helps are going to be part of the family system for a very long time to come. It is a matter of demand and supply.
The industry of house helps and their working conditions cannot continue like this. If they are being hired to work, house helps must necessarily be of the age of consent, and there must be modalities and laws put in place and enforced to see to it that they are not exploited. They must also be made to understand that there are rules governing their work and they must provide the services they are being paid to provide.
At the end of the day it should be a win-win situation for the house help, the family and the agency.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
The devil called PTA
By Doreen Hammond
It is difficult to put a date to when the slogan “Government cannot do it alone” began, but it seems to have come to stay and is being used by many state institutions as the reason why almost all sectors of our country are not running efficiently.
In the education sector, the slogan has translated into the formation of Parent –Teacher Associations (PTAs) in almost every basic and senior high school in the country.
It is equally difficult to trace when PTAs became part of our educational set up and who mooted an otherwise brilliant idea now turned into an instrument to fleece helpless parents. But my father tells me that when he was a student at Accra Academy in the fifties, this devil had not been conceived let alone born.
On the surface and as contained in many of the constitutions of these PTAs, they are to create and foster understanding and cooperation between parents / guardians and teachers in the training of their children.
These associations are supposed to facilitate the parental participation in the activities of the school for the benefit of the students. They are also to stimulate and maintain interest in the academic standards, sustain discipline and promote extracurricular activities. It also includes raising funds to support the development of the schools infrastructure.
Somehow these associations remain one that needs no registration to become a member and is not optional, once a child gains admission into a school, his parents or guardians become automatic members and that is why a parent could be penalised in the form of fines for not attending meetings. Even if a PTA meeting clashes with the burial of your mother, you are supposed to defer to the PTA or risk being fined for your absence!
Wonderful and well intentioned objectives they may look on paper but what have these PTAs been really up to in schools and how are they benefitting parents and students especially in public schools?
Discussions at these PTA meetings have been dominated by money. It has always been centred on collecting levies for everything from poly tanks to building classroom blocks, dormitories, teacher’s bungalows and even paying for chairs on which parents and teachers sit during such PTA meetings. The latest addition is electricity bills.
Apart from the Government approved fees for students / pupils in the case of public schools, parents at these meetings end up being cajoled into paying for so many things including what is termed “motivation” to teachers for doing the work they have been employed by the Ghana Education Service to do—teaching.
Even in private schools where the school is solely owned by a proprietor as a business entity, the PTAs are even more powerful. Parents are made to pay for all sorts of things including walls to fence the school even though they have no shares in the school.
Most meetings are hijacked by the cronies of the heads who are most often the chairmen of these associations to carry through the ideas of the heads, making believe that those ideas are those of parents.
For boarding schools, meetings are normally held on visiting days, a strategy to get parents to attend. Under duress, parents are made to sit through long hours of meetings while their minds are only centred on one thing—to see their children.
Apart from a few parents who question the impositions on parents, the rest sit and look on, for after all, question or no question it is the PTA chairman, the head of the school and the teachers who win. Sometimes something which is purported to be audited accounts are read out. In that state of mind all the parent wants to do is to get out of the room and see his/her child.
PTAs in some schools have become an avenue for some people to flaunt their wealth as these so called rich men keep proposing new projects without any consideration for the pocket of the less endowed parent.
When is enough supposed to be enough? Is the continuous existence of PTAs a statement on government’s inability to discharge what is clearly one of its constitutional requirements which is the provision of education? Why have successive governments not seen anything wrong with the excesses of PTAs? Let us say PTAs came about as a result of population growth but then what happened to planning to meet such growth?
The responsibility of education delivery in public schools should be that of Government and the role of the PTA should be purely supportive and voluntary, specifically ensuring the welfare of the child in the school.
The slogan of “Government cannot do it alone” is allowing Government to get away from its responsibilities of providing what the tax payers money is supposed to be used for.
So now we buy our own electricity poles, create our own water companies in our homes by digging our own bore holes, buy our own street lights, maintain the roads that lead to our communities and provide our own neighborhood security.
So what does the government provide for us to justify our continuous payment of taxes?
What happens to the many projects that parents contribute to building or providing after their children have left the schools when they are not shareholders of the school? No dividends?
The intention of running away from the high cost of private schools is often defeated by these associations which prefer to call themselves PTAs. Parents are already burdened with providing food, clothing and shelter for their children outside the school environment and their situation must not be compounded by the activities of these so called PTAs.
Certainly education is too important to be toyed with to the extent that even classroom blocks should be left on the shoulders of parents to build.
This trend of events must stop and PTAs must be called to order. They must be regulated in some way.
Alternatively, the government should come out openly to ask parents to pay for the facilities that they are unable to provide in the public schools. Payment for facilities which the Government is not providing “because the Government cannot do it alone” should be added officially to the school fees so that parents could plan and there will also be some transparency.
The PTA as it operates now is an otherwise brilliant idea that has been high jacked by a few to fleece already over burdened parents. This should not be allowed to go on. And that is why I could not help but agree with a parent who referred to it as the devil!
It is difficult to put a date to when the slogan “Government cannot do it alone” began, but it seems to have come to stay and is being used by many state institutions as the reason why almost all sectors of our country are not running efficiently.
In the education sector, the slogan has translated into the formation of Parent –Teacher Associations (PTAs) in almost every basic and senior high school in the country.
It is equally difficult to trace when PTAs became part of our educational set up and who mooted an otherwise brilliant idea now turned into an instrument to fleece helpless parents. But my father tells me that when he was a student at Accra Academy in the fifties, this devil had not been conceived let alone born.
On the surface and as contained in many of the constitutions of these PTAs, they are to create and foster understanding and cooperation between parents / guardians and teachers in the training of their children.
These associations are supposed to facilitate the parental participation in the activities of the school for the benefit of the students. They are also to stimulate and maintain interest in the academic standards, sustain discipline and promote extracurricular activities. It also includes raising funds to support the development of the schools infrastructure.
Somehow these associations remain one that needs no registration to become a member and is not optional, once a child gains admission into a school, his parents or guardians become automatic members and that is why a parent could be penalised in the form of fines for not attending meetings. Even if a PTA meeting clashes with the burial of your mother, you are supposed to defer to the PTA or risk being fined for your absence!
Wonderful and well intentioned objectives they may look on paper but what have these PTAs been really up to in schools and how are they benefitting parents and students especially in public schools?
Discussions at these PTA meetings have been dominated by money. It has always been centred on collecting levies for everything from poly tanks to building classroom blocks, dormitories, teacher’s bungalows and even paying for chairs on which parents and teachers sit during such PTA meetings. The latest addition is electricity bills.
Apart from the Government approved fees for students / pupils in the case of public schools, parents at these meetings end up being cajoled into paying for so many things including what is termed “motivation” to teachers for doing the work they have been employed by the Ghana Education Service to do—teaching.
Even in private schools where the school is solely owned by a proprietor as a business entity, the PTAs are even more powerful. Parents are made to pay for all sorts of things including walls to fence the school even though they have no shares in the school.
Most meetings are hijacked by the cronies of the heads who are most often the chairmen of these associations to carry through the ideas of the heads, making believe that those ideas are those of parents.
For boarding schools, meetings are normally held on visiting days, a strategy to get parents to attend. Under duress, parents are made to sit through long hours of meetings while their minds are only centred on one thing—to see their children.
Apart from a few parents who question the impositions on parents, the rest sit and look on, for after all, question or no question it is the PTA chairman, the head of the school and the teachers who win. Sometimes something which is purported to be audited accounts are read out. In that state of mind all the parent wants to do is to get out of the room and see his/her child.
PTAs in some schools have become an avenue for some people to flaunt their wealth as these so called rich men keep proposing new projects without any consideration for the pocket of the less endowed parent.
When is enough supposed to be enough? Is the continuous existence of PTAs a statement on government’s inability to discharge what is clearly one of its constitutional requirements which is the provision of education? Why have successive governments not seen anything wrong with the excesses of PTAs? Let us say PTAs came about as a result of population growth but then what happened to planning to meet such growth?
The responsibility of education delivery in public schools should be that of Government and the role of the PTA should be purely supportive and voluntary, specifically ensuring the welfare of the child in the school.
The slogan of “Government cannot do it alone” is allowing Government to get away from its responsibilities of providing what the tax payers money is supposed to be used for.
So now we buy our own electricity poles, create our own water companies in our homes by digging our own bore holes, buy our own street lights, maintain the roads that lead to our communities and provide our own neighborhood security.
So what does the government provide for us to justify our continuous payment of taxes?
What happens to the many projects that parents contribute to building or providing after their children have left the schools when they are not shareholders of the school? No dividends?
The intention of running away from the high cost of private schools is often defeated by these associations which prefer to call themselves PTAs. Parents are already burdened with providing food, clothing and shelter for their children outside the school environment and their situation must not be compounded by the activities of these so called PTAs.
Certainly education is too important to be toyed with to the extent that even classroom blocks should be left on the shoulders of parents to build.
This trend of events must stop and PTAs must be called to order. They must be regulated in some way.
Alternatively, the government should come out openly to ask parents to pay for the facilities that they are unable to provide in the public schools. Payment for facilities which the Government is not providing “because the Government cannot do it alone” should be added officially to the school fees so that parents could plan and there will also be some transparency.
The PTA as it operates now is an otherwise brilliant idea that has been high jacked by a few to fleece already over burdened parents. This should not be allowed to go on. And that is why I could not help but agree with a parent who referred to it as the devil!
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