One of the bonuses from living in Mexico is that help is not super expensive. I pay more than a local would but even so it is well within my budget. I also have a housekeeper that has been working for me for 4 years and she comes 3x a week to do those things, like mopping the endless tile floors, that I just am not going to do. I have too many dogs and cats to let the floors go, I could build a whole other animal out of the hair after a week.
I know Oscar would like more work and I want to help but I am cautious that I don't send him off to someone who will not let him work my little side job. He lives in a village about 45 min outside of the city and takes a bus in to work for me. Even with that expense, he makes more working for me than he would working as a concrete laborer and he is going to school with the extra time. The work week here is 5.5 days, full time workers work from Monday to mid day Saturday. Things are better now though, there is more employment and the economy is doing well. Mexico did not suffer as much when the US went down, they were not a credit economy. Unfortunately, I see more and more ads for credit and I fear it could happen here as it did up north.
One of my side ventures is managing the houses of expats who are not full time residents. I pay their bills, water their plants, have things fixed and cleaned, deal with stuff in Spanish for them. I took Oscar to one of those houses last week and he weeded the entire garden in a couple hours. So, yeah, he says he is not a gardener but he does know quite a bit about plants. He's been teaching me the names of many that I didn't know, he speaks both Mayan and Spanish.
