Finding A Job Abroad

MUST IT ALWAYS BE CLEANING OR CUSTOMER SERVICE? Part I of III

In most employment circles in the West cleaners are respected for one thing: they hardly fall in love with their fellow cleaners. And it is not because they fear that they would fall for the temptation of making the beast with two backs in the toilets, instead of their homes; it is because they don’t believe in the old CPP slogan-Work and Happiness. You can’t be happy if your job description, no matter the euphemisms employed to express it, boils down to cleaning other people’s waste. Given that waste expresses itself in different forms, including the abominable remains of the human digestive programme, you normally have to struggle to ward off the impression that you are not wasting away.

It so happens that cleaners are also the most racist of all professionals. I overheard two cleaners of African origin, Ghanaians to be exact, gossiping about another cleaner. One of them was confident that her type of cleaning, support service she called it, was a lot better than other peoples’, because the toilets she cleans are used by only whites, and they keep them very clean all the time. In organizations where the workforce is multicultural, the toilets are also multicultural: they witness various shades and colours of gaseous substances from across the globe. ‘It takes your dignity away; you feel really down when see familiar faces where you are cleaning’, she pitifully submitted. David Diop, the celebrated South African poet, would have given his poems on Apartheid a different taste if he had studied how blacks discriminate against people’s human remains.

The sad part of the cleaning odyssey is that nobody ever sets out to develop a career in cleaning. In fact, the queues at the British and American Embassies in Africa would be much shorter if visa applicants knew the sort of jobs awaiting them abroad. Accomplished professionals give up thriving careers in very important industries to start all over again abroad. A visa, we must appreciate, has a very irresistible enigmatic pull: you are comfortable with your decent stress-free job until you have it in your palms. It works like the sexual psychology of a man who suffers premature ejaculation: he would quickly come through at the sight of the silhouetted image of a child’s painting of Marilyn Monroe’s bosom. In much the same way, you would go however dreadful the Aburokyire prospect seems. Elu-oyibo, however bad it would be, should be a hundred times better than the fortunes of an Okereka seller (second hand clothes dealer) in Lagos.

Often people who know better would persuade you to consider taking advantage of the plentiful opportunities in your home country. They would tell you how Martin Luther King’s equality Dream is becoming a veritable nightmare, because the blacks, those for whom the dream was made, are always trying to outdream each other instead of dreaming together to keep the dream alive. But those arguments do not scare anybody, just as the desperate conditions of teenage mothers would not deter a cursed nymphomaniac from wearing her libido on her forehead. Those around you usually look funny when you are preparing your luggage. It is almost customary not to tell anybody that you are traveling abroad. That practice has come to stay, because the first person who made the mistake of trumpeting into everybody’s years that he was going overseas was repatriated before the aircraft would touch down. Somebody, one of those yaanom, had miraculously planted an itchy substance on his seat, which made him scratch himself from the crown of his head to the soles of his feet. He was taken for a madman before he could explain himself to immigration officials. I don’t remember telling my aunt when I was leaving for the UK, and she never requested an apology, because her husband did not tell anybody when he was going to Libya. Imagine what he did when he continued from there to America.

I don’t know what the word aburokyire means; it doesn’t sound like a good word to me. I don’t think the back of a corn, the literal meaning of the word, has anything good to offer. May be, things would have been better if it had been aburonim-the front of the corn. Because of the curse on that word, we are always behind wherever we are. The cleaning industry is populated by blacks. In fact, nearly 85% of cleaners in the west are blacks. I don’t remember the last time I saw a Chinese or an Indian cleaning any body’s toilets for a minimum wage. The Chinese, however, would have done themselves a lot of honour cleaning than providing cheap sex in their massage parlours. Indians are a big family where everybody is called Patel, so you would not know who is doing what, even if they do odd jobs secretly. Besides, they love each other, unlike Ghanaians, who love only themselves. You are likely to find 20 Patels in a white-owned IT company, because the first Patel was selfless enough to introduce all the others. They also own most of the corner confectionary shops. Ghanaians who own shops and restaurants abroad are prime ministers and presidents in their own right. They pay their workers a tenth of the minimum wage and subject them to cruel bullying and intimidation that Vladimir Putin would envy to emulate. Those who complain are summarily dismissed, because there were no appointments letters to begin with. Besides, most of their workers are illegal immigrants, who would foam at the mouth at the mention of Koti-the police.

Apart from cleaning, we also excel in customer service jobs. By now, we should know that security, the five-star job for African students, also falls under customer service. These day, they call is corporate observation, to make it sound posh and hi-tech. The very ambitious security officers call themselves Out-of-Hours corporate consultants. Shelf stockers have been christened pre-sales coordinators and factory workers have created an organogram for themselves, in which they are known as industrial technicians. Folks in the care industry-those whose job it is to bath and wipe the backsides of disabled octogenarians-now see themselves as welfare consultants. Shop floor assistants in big departmental shops have given themselves the arrogant designation of sales consultants. I had so much respect for the word consultant until I came to London, where any buffoon with a brain the size of a peanut could have the title bestowed on him. I had seen the CV of a London-based distant cousin, in which she had stated that she was a senior sales consultant in an organization whose name sounded so posh to me until I went shopping there when I came abroad. I would find that those consultants at Marks and Spencers are only trained to look shoppers in the eye and follow them about like pregnant sheep, showing them where to find what and what will fit who. If you were her friend and you met her on the shop floor, she would only mime her response to your greeting, because she has to be professional always. They are never able to afford any of the things they sell until the final reductions in the clearance sales. So, most of them buy their underpants from High street £1 pound shops. And their stockings are mostly torn at the rear. The tragedy with these non-consulting consultations is not the frustration those jobs bring to those consultants; it the most tragic reality that they are actually good enough to be real consultants in their home countries. I know a cleaner in Colchester, UK, who has an MBA, and is also part three-qualified in the ACCA professional examinations. Of course, he also has a first degree from a Ghanaian university named after one Mr. Kwame Nkrumah. Most of these consultants have very good degrees in their drawers-most often degrees obtained from universities in the west. Often, the most legitimate question anybody would ask is why they are doing those odd jobs when they could do something a lot decent with their academic qualifications. The answer to this question, unfortunately, has nothing to do with ‘academics’; it has everything to do with Aberantee Amakye Dede, as unacademic as that name sounds, the Iron Boy that he is. He warned in one of his songs that a successful immigrant can never be as fortunate as the owners of the land. Globalisation, as a concept, did not have the currency it enjoys today when Mr Amakye sung that song, but he was forward-looking enough to have submitted that when things go wrong in one location on the globe, you need to move somewhere else. And where is more somewhere than home, where opportunities are everywhere, wherever you are.

Of course, opportunities are not everywhere; that is why people now behave like the traditional Fulani or the mediaeval troubadour-always on the move. And going abroad could be anything from stowing yourself away in the engine compartment of a cargo ship from the Tema Harbour to Spain, with sacks of gari and sugar as your only companion, or galvanizing the energy of a globe-trotting bus, to walk through a dangerous desert to Libya. Depending on your circumstances, going abroad could mean leaving a village setting to the biggest cosmopolitan city in the region, while in the same country. So, I wasn’t surprised when the young man who takes care of my father’s grasscutter farm gave me the impression that he had migrated from a cottage close to the Ghanaian half of the Ivory Coast border, to the Brong Ahafo regional capital of Sunyani. I found it funny when he told me that he had a Diploma in management from a college in Ivory Coast. If he could manage anything in his life other than grasscutters, what was he doing in our house? He produced a piece of paper on which his name had been neatly calligraphed, with the word Diploma boldly inscribed at the top. Well, it could well be his, but it doesn’t mean that he could do what the paper says he has been trained to do. He may well have produced it himself from a printing press somewhere.

Sometimes, when we display our degrees at recruitment agencies in the west, they see them as grasscutters. If an African security guard who spends his life in a small gatehouse at a bonded warehouse, often struggling to keep awake behind CCTV cameras, one day tells his white supervisor that he has two masters degrees, the semi-literate supervisor would see it as the biggest joke that the Guinness Book of Records missed. He would take it with a pinch of salt, if the degree holder’s English is good. If his English is not great, he is certain to treat that contemptuous claim with a pinch of grasscutters, as it were. Masters degree holders do not work in the night keeping vigil when their mothers are still alive; they occupy posh offices at exclusive addresses, where they think through policies and strategies to meet targets that would please shareholders at the next general meeting. But, they would politely congratulate you and wish you well, while picturing the number of coconut tress in the university that awarded him those degrees. See part II next week.

By Benjamin Tawiah

The author is a freelance journalist; he lives in London, where he also teaches Journalism and English as a foreign language. Email: quesiquesi@hotmail.co.uk / btawiah@hotmail.com.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.