the cactus where my heart should be

There are many advantages to living in Africa. The weather. The landscape. The food. The rugged independence of the locals. The South African constitution. Rugby as a national sport instead of baseball. Being chased by lion. However, under the heading of Disadvantages I find myself skipping blithely over the crime, the lack of broadband, the marginalisation of my research interests and my incredible distance from ComicCon to focus firmly on the biggest negative of them all: Colonial Guilt.

We rejoiced for many years in the possession of the Perfect Gardener. Jackson was a lovely man, with quite the nicest broad grin I have ever seen; he was an experienced gardener who knew a lot more about it than I did, and quietly got on with things with efficiency and skill. I hired him more or less at random: he stopped outside our gate one day, where I'd just emerged from my car to stand ankle-deep in dead leaves and dead grass, and asked, with a commendable absence of pointed looks, if we needed a gardener. I liked his face and his references were good, so we gave him a trial, revealing that we'd lucked out big time. However, Wonder!Jackson retired at the end of last year, returning to the Transkei to be with his wife and his mealie crop. In his place he arranged to leave us his son.

I have no problem with the idea of giving JacksonSon a trial as a gardener; Jackson deserved that much. I have an enormous problem with the discovery that said son is not, as Jackson assured me he was, trained as a gardener. He's not only completely inexperienced and basically useless for anything more than tidying up, he's also bloody lazy and doesn't learn because he doesn't want to be a gardener. While I commend his ambition, I do not enjoy having to tell him to do things multiple times and still have them undone; nor do I enjoy having him rip up the grass while raking too hard, or "dig in" compost by putting it on top of the impacted earth and giving it a few ineffectual prods with a spade. Finally, he's pushy: he perpetually wants more work, more money, a maid's job for his wife, my attention to listen to his rambling stories of his plans to be anything other than a gardener, with a heavy subtext that I should be helping him achieve them.

He's not a gardener. I can't make him into a gardener, because I work full time, and besides, I resent being dragged into that expectation without my consent. I doubt he has any idea I'm not happy with his work, his self-satisfaction is ineffable. However, I am basically afraid to tell him to pull his socks up if he wants to keep his job, because he's in our house unsupervised one day a week: we have to leave it unlocked for him because we don't have an outside toilet. I don't like or trust him enough to leave him with that access under threat of firing, I think there's a small but real chance he'd rip us off and bugger off. So I'm left with two options: bite the bullet, or fire him out of a clear blue sky (although with, I have to add, at least a month's wages as severance package, the EL is generous that way).

I've vacillated about this for several months. JacksonSon is not as advertised, he does a poor job, he's lazy and slow, he deserves to be fired. However, in firing him I will be materially disadvantaging his attempts to better himself, as well as creating hardship for him and his wife. He is unlikely, in this economic climate, with our unemployment levels and with his skills, to find a replacement job, particularly since I won't be able to give him glowing references to support him. It's also a betrayal, on some level, of Jackson's excellent service. But against all this I place an inadequately-tended garden, bits of dying and unweeded lawn, a sense that I'm being exploited, and an irritation factor in the high altitudes once a week. I am also keeping out of a legitimate job a large number of actual qualified gardeners who need it just as desperately.

I think we're going to fire him, but I hate myself.