Your Geography Quiz

I enjoyed interacting with the staff on our cruise a lot more than with the other passengers.  Frankly, I found them to be more interesting.  And I find that privileged people can be boorish and self-absorbed.  I say this with a good sense of irony, too, as I find myself squarely in the pretty goddamned privileged class of people.  Part of this, I assume, is that my upbringing was squarely in the middle-class so I still identify with people hustling for their dinner rather than with people who are eating in fine restaurants.  I believe that the staff was treated OK by most of the passengers.  I also surmise that they were faceless servants to many people.  "Give me a piece of pie, please."  That kind of thing.  They were looked through.  

Most of the staff were young - they worked hard and for long hours - and most of them were from disadvantaged countries.  SuperK and I nourished relationships with some of these kids.  They all wore name tags that gave their first name and the country they call home.  Most of them are bright and educated but are unable to find suitable employment in their struggling home economies.  For instance, my table was often cleared by a young man from the Ukraine who has an engineering degree.  I'm going to look down on that guy?

SuperK pays me the compliment of having the ability to draw people out.  There were three friends from Kyrgyzstan who worked the stations of the restaurant we favored.  Kyrgyzstan!  Are you kidding me?  I could tell at the start that they were pretty reticent and shy about telling me about their lives but I always took a stroll down the serving line, caught their eye, engaged them if they weren't helping anyone.  After a while I could see their faces light up when they saw me coming.  They started calling me Mr Steve and they started opening up, telling me about their lives when they had a minute.  I'm not going to lie, either - it's pleasing at my age to get a big smile from a young woman.

I think about being of service and what that means.  I think about how I complicate everything, how it has to be big and extravagant or I can't be bothered.  Pshaw.  Yesterday I got an email from one of the women.  She asked if we still remembered her and even attached some pictures from the ship in case we had forgotten who she was.  I assured her that we had literally thought of them every day since we got home (we are FB friends with one of them so get to follow their progress around the world, and that helps).

This shows me that we made a difference in someone else's life.  We're remembered.  It confirms our suspicions that most people treat the staff as disposable, interchangeable servants.  It's no more difficult than that.