Aid and the Help by Dinah Hannaford;

Author:Dinah Hannaford;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

After serving in the Peace Corps, getting a master’s degree in policy, and working for a development contractor in Washington, DC, Gemma joined USAID where, at forty-six, she held a supervisory role. When we spoke, she was bound for an even more senior position at another international post, and she expressed pride and ambition about her trajectory. Gemma compared her experience to that of a girlfriend in Washington, DC, who had stayed at the development contractor where Gemma had worked before joining USAID. This friend was advancing much more slowly at her agency, and when she finally got an opportunity for a director position, she turned it down. Gemma thought her friend was crazy for refusing this major promotion. Gemma, who is a mother of two, framed her friend’s decision thusly: “It’s one of those things where she has a family now, and she’s trying to find work-life balance.”

Before they moved abroad, Gemma, too, struggled to balance the demands of work and family. For the first ten years of their marriage in Washington, DC, when Gemma worked full-time at the private development agency and later for USAID’s domestic office, she and her husband could not afford childcare or household help. In this period, Gemma’s husband cared for the children during the day and worked nights as a parking valet. She recounts literally passing their first child back and forth to cover their childcare needs: “There were times when he would drive downtown, pass the kid to me. I would take the kid, get back on the metro, and go home for him to be on time and for me to leave on time.” This “tag-team parenting” has become more common in the US, as parents embrace working different schedules as a means to reduce childcare costs (Bianchi 2011, 18). Gemma and her husband never had the time or money for vacations, let alone the cost of daycare in DC, which can be upward of $2,000 a month per child. Gemma recalled coming home from her demanding and stressful job, strapping her infant onto her back, and cooking for the family, starting the laundry, bathing the children, and putting them to bed on her own while her husband worked his night job.

When Gemma took her first overseas post with USAID and the family moved to East Africa, she and her husband hired a nanny, a housekeeper, and a chauffeur. Right away her work and her home life changed dramatically. With the help of her domestic staff, she was able to continue to lean in at work while enjoying her personal time as well. When she returned home from work, the house would be clean; the laundry would be washed, folded, and put away; the dinner hot and ready to eat; and the kids bathed and ready for bed. This meant that she could finally spend time with the husband who for so many years of tag-team parenting she had seen only in passing. When “we first started being home together at night, we were like, ‘Oh, who are you?’” Gemma recalled, laughing.

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