When we first took this assignment, I have to be honest...having a helper was definitely a plus, especially in the season of life we were in. I had never had a house cleaner, so the fact that someone would come in and not only clean, but cook, shop, laundry and watch the kids was pretty remarkable to me. My first instinct was the blessing it would be just so I could spend more time with my husband and children. But then, as my husband and I talked more about it, we wondered if it would impact our family time and impede on our space. Most helpers live with you, which is actually the less expensive way to do it, otherwise you are responsible for their living accommodations and transportation. Was this really necessary or just a luxury? We started to talk to others who had lived on this side of the world and kept getting the same message...get a helper. While we didn't fully understand the reasoning since we hadn't experienced living here yet, we felt like it was something we should pursue.
We started getting "word of mouth" recommendations, which was very helpful. When we were here in May, we even interviewed a couple women, but both of them needed work before we were going to be in Hong Kong. One of the interesting things in the process was how often people said we needed 2 maybe 3 helpers. Of course we thought this was ridiculous. We couldn't wrap our heads around the idea of hiring two or three extra people to do jobs that I have always done on my own (or with the help of my family). It was difficult enough to think of hiring one extra person. But of course, we do have a larger family than most in Hong Kong...and we did get the response from employers we spoke to that our family was too large for their helper when weeding through the recommendations. Still, we stuck to our guns. We also decided to go through an agency. We needed help in this process, especially doing it from the other side of the world. It was important to us that we find someone who shared our faith, so the agency we used was given to us through a church contact and was a Christian organization.
To make a long story a little shorter, we were paired up with a woman who was still working in the Philippines and being trained by the agency to come to Hong Kong to be a domestic helper. We were able to skype her a couple times, and finally, after all the paperwork was completed, she was able to join us the end of November. Her name is Marina, and she has been an absolute blessing. She is a mother of five (one girl and four boys), so she didn't even flinch at our crew. While it has been a bit challenging for her (and us) that she is not as familiar with getting around Hong Kong as, say, a helper who has already lived here, she is a quick and eager learner. And, we have both been on the same learning curve in this process...both coming without any presumptions. We are working with a clean slate! This is something I have greatly appreciated and feel blessed by in the process.
I will close this post with saying, yet again, that the Lord gives us what we need, even before we realize we need it. We are so grateful for the advice given by friends, the recommendation of the agency we used, and the Lord's guidance through it all. It was a long three months living in Hong Kong without Marina's help...and it would have been much longer if we hadn't started the process when we did, from the states. I will share in the next post of some more specifics of how this all works for us, but I wanted to share a little of what the mindset is here and how we have come to be where we are on this journey.
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