BLOG: "...the most diverse room of people in Portland..."
Sam Adams
It's lunchtime.
I am in the employee lunchroom in the basement of the downtown Portland Embassy Suites Hotel.
After two hours of janitorial work, it feels good to sit down.
I spent the morning helping Balma scrub and sweep the pool and Jacuzzi area, clean the windows in the lobby, vacuum the main staircase, and empty the public trash cans.
Cleaning hair, soap scum, and lint from shower drains it is my new least favorite task. Instead, give me a dirty toilet to clean any day.
Balma has left me alone while she gets her homemade lunch.
Hoping for the caffeine to kick in soon from my diet coke, I wait for my chicken enchilada lunch order to get cooked.
The employees around me wear different uniforms based on their position in the hotel: The concierge wears a suit as do the check-in clerks; Bellmen wear long-sleeved white shirts with a tie and vest. I am wearing the two-toned gray smock of a housekeeping room cleaner.
Lively conversations surround me in languages that I think include Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, Thai, Tagalog and Indonesian.
My deduction is aided by the fact we all wear a nametag includes our city or country of origin.
As I wait, I think how odd it is that the most diverse room of people in Portland might be in the basement of this hotel. An apt metaphor for a untapped u
nderground asset: How can we use this local language talent to further our connections to the world? And, in the process provide upward salary movement for these folks?
The chicken enchilada arrives as Balma returns with a Tupperware container of dinner leftovers of chicken and rice. We eat and talk.
She is from the city of Luzon, in the Philippines. We are the same age except she looks 10 years younger.
Balma has lived in the Portland area for six and a half years. She has worked at the hotel for six years. She likes her job. She recently won an outstanding employee award.
She gets up at 4 a.m. five days a week to commute 45 minutes by bus or a quicker 20 minute carpool every day from her family’s home in Gresham. She makes $8.81 per hour plus health care benefits - good wages for this industry.
She used to commute by bus both to and from home but was recently accosted at a bus stop early in the morning. “I am too afraid to stand at the bus stop by myself so early in the morning.” Now she gets a ride from her brother-in-law and takes the bus home.
I ask what she does with her time off.
“I rest,” she says.
“I can see why.”
I leave the table to grab another diet coke.
Balma is done with her lunch when I return.
I wash down the remainder of my chicken enchilada; my 30 minute lunch break is up.
Back to work at a different task.
Cyda is in the midst of cleaning a room when Roberto the hotel housing keeping manager introduces us on the hotel’s mezzanine level.
Cyda is from a small city in Brazil. She has been in Portland for two years. Her husband also works at the hotel. They live in Washington County and have son in elementary school.
Cyda cleans each room in a blur of flailing arms working counterclockwise to the middle.
She can tear a bed down in seconds and remake it in about three minutes.
We clean all glass surfaces with glass cleaner. We polish all other services with polish. The bathrooms are scrubbed and disinfected thoroughly. As she cleans the room, she explains the
not-so-obvious places the hotel's housekeeping inspectors will look for dust like behind the coffee maker and cups.
She leaves me to vacuum and moves on to the next room. She checks on me as I am unplugging the vacuum cord.
“Do it this way and save time,” she shows me.
She’s right.
After four more rooms we get a break.
On the sidewalk in the back of a hotel she offers me a cigarette. Tempted, I decline.
A friend of hers from Cuba joins us. They talk. She introduces me as the new guy who is good at vacuuming. She turns to me as an aside and explains that the second language she learned after her native Portuguese was Spanish then English.
She asks if I speak any Portuguese. I tell her I speak a little Spanish. In a mock scolding voice, she tells me I need to learn more languages if I want to get ahead in the world.
I think that’s good advice for me and our city.
Back to work…
Posted by Sam Adams on August 31, 2005
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