The next morning I had a feel of how baby sitting goes! There are a few options for women at home to earn some handy income in Canada - baby sitting is one and paper delivery is another.
If you were to do baby sitting full time for 8 hours a day and with 6 to 8 kids then you could possibly even live out of your earnings - about Canadian $4000 a month. You do need to have a home with space for the kids though. Otherwise you could baby sit for maybe an hour or two in a day and earn about $10 for an hour. Just need to keep watch of the baby; see if you can keep the baby quiet when it cries; feed it if it's hungry (the baby's parents will provide you suitable food for feeding the baby). The parent will drop and pick up the baby from the babysitter's residence.
Dinner get together
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| Common to see such pretty side roads |
When we regrouped in the main hall, with the men it was politics that they started discussing. Once that was exhausted, the topic that always comes up when you have a working single person in the group is marriage. We discussed about horoscopes, matches and pros of marriages. Sometimes one wonders why we are so obsessed on this topic; ah well, I guess nothing else interesting to talk about! The married folks in these discussions talk as if marriage is the solution to all world problems! Naturally the topic shifted to love marriages; if the 'arranged' mode doesn't work due to horoscope mismatches and what not then find your own partner; people make it sound as if it is the easiest thing in the world! They mentioned about a peculiar case of a couple of Indians who were raised in Canada who knew each other very well for 2 years (or who assumed they knew each other very well) - they got married with blessings of both families and on the 2nd day after marriage they filed for divorce.
In between one of the men mentioned about his bad experience at someone's home; then he mentioned a similar incident that happened elsewhere; and since the people involved in both were from the same region of India, he concluded that all people from that region are of the same type. And I wondered how often I do the same - we see a couple of cases and we stereotype everyone as being like that; what a dangerous bias.
Finally we moved out of the topic of marriage. Just like in the neighbouring country people talked of the American dream, here you could make your Canadian dream. They mentioned how all jobs are treated with respect here - they told a case about a young educated single mom from Vietnam who migrated to Canada, did odd part time jobs and worked as a cleaner in some company, who signed up for studying about architecture and then landed a job in that field. There was the story about a Punjabi taxi driver who had been driving in Canada for 20 years, who bought a house long back for 100,000 dollars which was now valued at more than a million. But the taxi driver didn't really know what to do with the money now - I guess he had reached the stage where he outgrew money; after a point it doesn't really matter, does it?
Paper deliveries
In Canada, there are many free advertising booklets/papers that are circulated frequently. This trend is slowly catching on in India as well. In the neighbourhood we were in, these advertising pamphlets are distributed twice a week. Distributing requires delivery boys or girls. For this, there is a middle man who takes the contract to cover a few neighbourhoods. The middle man will employ freelance workers from each neighbourhood and ask them to deliver the packages to a few homes (a package is a loose collection of many booklets; for each house it would be around 15 to 20 booklets with 4 or 5 pages in each). Depending on the amount of packages delivered (earnings calculated by weight), you get paid by the middle man. It does fetch some handy pocket money - roughly you might get paid about $300 a month for say delivering to 300 houses; each house you would have to deliver 8 packages a month. It's not as easy as just throwing the paper you receive on the doorstep; you might have to roll it to put a rubber band around each so that you can fling it - else the papers will fly in the breeze (which happens to be there almost always in this part of the world). The rubber banding does take time and is quite boring.
The middle man doesn't force the area of coverage on you - you can pick the houses you will deliver to. I've heard some people make around $1000 doing this. The delivering itself doesn't take much time - you put the packages in a bag, walk around (or cycle), throw one on the doorstep of a house and move to the next. Problem is you might only be able to carry about 50 at a time because sometimes the package can be really big and heavy.
Delivering itself can get scary when it's dark because streets over here are usually deserted unlike India. Sometimes when you toss the paper, you might hear a dog barking ferociously from inside the house. Sometimes you get a sense of which homes have been unoccupied for long by seeing the number of papers lying on their doorstep. Sometimes you get to chat with someone from the home in case they are standing outside their home. Over time you will definitely develop a good accurate throwing arm!
In Canada, there are many free advertising booklets/papers that are circulated frequently. This trend is slowly catching on in India as well. In the neighbourhood we were in, these advertising pamphlets are distributed twice a week. Distributing requires delivery boys or girls. For this, there is a middle man who takes the contract to cover a few neighbourhoods. The middle man will employ freelance workers from each neighbourhood and ask them to deliver the packages to a few homes (a package is a loose collection of many booklets; for each house it would be around 15 to 20 booklets with 4 or 5 pages in each). Depending on the amount of packages delivered (earnings calculated by weight), you get paid by the middle man. It does fetch some handy pocket money - roughly you might get paid about $300 a month for say delivering to 300 houses; each house you would have to deliver 8 packages a month. It's not as easy as just throwing the paper you receive on the doorstep; you might have to roll it to put a rubber band around each so that you can fling it - else the papers will fly in the breeze (which happens to be there almost always in this part of the world). The rubber banding does take time and is quite boring.
The middle man doesn't force the area of coverage on you - you can pick the houses you will deliver to. I've heard some people make around $1000 doing this. The delivering itself doesn't take much time - you put the packages in a bag, walk around (or cycle), throw one on the doorstep of a house and move to the next. Problem is you might only be able to carry about 50 at a time because sometimes the package can be really big and heavy.
Delivering itself can get scary when it's dark because streets over here are usually deserted unlike India. Sometimes when you toss the paper, you might hear a dog barking ferociously from inside the house. Sometimes you get a sense of which homes have been unoccupied for long by seeing the number of papers lying on their doorstep. Sometimes you get to chat with someone from the home in case they are standing outside their home. Over time you will definitely develop a good accurate throwing arm!
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