Our household garbage here in Ho Chi Minh City is currently collected by a small team of people (and a motorcycle cart), led by a lady who normally wears a green coat and one of the traditional Vietnamese conical hats. She was waiting at the end of our street this afternoon as Sadie and I returned from dropping Madeline off at a classmate's birthday party. Today, the lady in the green coat was by to give me my bill for a month's worth of hauling away our household rubbish. My total was 110,000 Vietnamese dong. She also passed along a second bill, also for 110, 000 dong, but her writing on the "subject" line was something that I didn't recognize. One of the security people compared my pair of bills, frowning a bit, but explained that the second bill was for the "Thirteen-Month Bonus". I knew that families here in Vietnam pay thirteen-month bonuses (basically, an extra month's earnings) to any people that they'd hired to work in their household (people like gardeners, cooks, and drivers, for example) as the Tet holiday approaches, but this was the first I had heard about the garbage collectors being on that list as well. Hmm. I checked with the security guy, who indicated that his garbage collector person also expectes a bonus, so I felt somewhat more reassured that I wasn't being scammed out when I handed over the 220,000 dong to the smiling lady in the green coat (who'd brought along her cute little grandson). It's more the principle of the thing more than the cash, anyways :)
Wow, I did the conversion and 110000 VND is only $5.60 CDN. She earns only $5 a month? My gosh.
Posted by: Auntie Julie | January 23, 2011 at 02:35 PM
I'm pretty certain that she works the entire neighbourhood, and beyond. That's just our own bill for Dec-Jan.
Posted by: laura | January 23, 2011 at 09:03 PM