Sundays

Domestic help is very common here - nannies, maids, cooks. Exorbitantly expensive as rental space is here, upmarket apartments would normally have a maid-room. As Rita was explaining recently, the locals prefer to hire Indonesians as they find Cantonese fairly easy to learn and can communicate with the family quite well within a year. That's rare with others - Cantonese is not an easy language. Conversely, foreigners tend to hire the Filipinos, as thanks to their American education system, they speak very good English and so communication works out well from the start.

The popularity of those jobs fills the city with Indonesian and Filipino women. Their husbands are apparently leading a fairly lazy lifestyle back home, unable to find jobs and subsidized by their wives. These women don't normally travel home to save the airfare and don't get to see their children often. Sometimes, not in several years.

For the most part, they work 6 days a week and get Sundays off, when their employers are off work and enjoy family time. Sundays is their opportunity to congregate. The HSBC building in the center is the congregation spot for the Filipinos. Indonesians get together in Causeway Bay's Victoria Park.

I did not know all that just a week into my stay, when I got out on my first longer walk around the neighbourhood on a hot Sunday afternoon and, overwhelmed by the crowds, set my feet towards the largest green spot closeby according to my map - the Victoria Park - in search of shadow, quiet and solitude...

The Park turned out to be the same as the one I have been passing by every morning in a tram to work, but on this hot humid Sunday afternoon it looked very different...

Already on approach to the park, the sidewalks were taken over by women sitting on the ground around picnic tablecloths lain with home made foods, watermelon, fruit, or simply with bags of chips or snacks. They were so many, that walking without looking under your feet was impossible: you could at any point step on someone's shoe, or hand, or stumble over their feet.

I assumed them to be the Filipinos until I noticed that quite a few were praying muslims. Romina had earlier told me that Filipinos, much like Poles, are over 90% Catholic. Although my next guess was Indonesians, I did not recognize the faces as similar to my two Indonesian colleagues that worked together with us in Krakow. Maybe Malaysians?

But talks to colleagues at work the next day confirmed, this was the common congregation spot of Indonesian domestic help workers.

These gatherings are a subculture of its own. I've seen two sports teams in identical tee-shirts resting from pratice, a group of young girls learning a dance together, a group of a bit elder women rehearsing a song with notes in hand and that was an impressive choir performance!