does it pay to complain????

I finally made a mental list of everything broken in the apartment… and then waited for the right moment to tell our landlord who happens to be one of my bosses and the mother of one of my students about the problems. She called her husband to have it taken care of and he came round a few nights later with his son and several fix it people. Which was great except that the place is a mss. There are four of us who live here and the two of us girls go back and forth on whether to pick up after the guys or not. They refuse to do anything at all: to pick up their trash, wash their dishes, taking out their trash. We sometimes have a lady who cleans for us. She is incredibly cheap less than 15 dollars a week but the boys complain that they resent having someone coming and cleaning up after them, although they don’t mind us girls cleaning up after them.
So the main issue isn’t that the boys are slobs and it sucks to live with them but that the repair people and landlord came by and couldn’t believe what a dump the place was and even though Isabel and my room were very clean they still kept looking at us girls and judging us…
He in the Muslim world we live in it is the girl’s responsibility to keep things clean. I can deal with that if we were playing by Muslim rules because I wouldn’t be living with someone who wasn’t a family member. If these guys were my family members and not my direct boss than I could tell them or expect them to help out in other ways even if they weren’t cleaning.
Here it would be a man’s job to call the repair people and get that organized and then when they show up to help them out or point them in the right direction. When I asked them a few weeks ago about how to get everything fixed they told me they were leaving in a month and it wasn’t their problem. So not only do we get judged about the house not being clean enough and rumors are spread all over school about it but then I had to come home every day for the past four evenings and sit around while the repair people come and go. Mean while the guys are annoyed that I am not at sitting in the office or hanging out after school doing what ever it is they think I should be doing…
Good news for me, today I found scouring powder in the market and bought a dust pan for sweeping… and a whole store filled with all kinds of cleaning supplies that I can’t wait to get back to after pay day!
Despite all of these frustrations, yesterday I got a five minute hot shower and today I think there is hope for another one. They switched us over to a solar powered water heater.... I have hope!