life on mars?

Hello from Sweden where my husband and I are staying with my MIL on and off for the next month while we enjoy summer things and also help her with some of the tasks she can't really manage on her own since her stroke. One of the services she receives in Sweden is homecare, paid for by the government, which entails visits to her home several times a day to give her medicine, help her prepare food, clean, and bathe. We are just learning about this schedule since we arrived on Monday since this is not something she could clearly communicate to us.

The stroke has left my MIL unable to really process time so she doesn't know what day or time it is and she could not tell us what the schedule was (i.e. what times each day they come to do what). This has made it tricky to schedule things. Apparently, she was supposed to be given help with a shower yesterday around 13.30 when we were out having lunch and running errands. This was rescheduled for today and the person who came to help her and arrived around 9.00 was a man in his 30s. One thing of interesting note is that this is the first male homecare worker we have seen (all the others have been women) and most of them are of immigrant backgrounds. In Sweden, many immigrants have a muslim background and may adhere to Islamic practices that are sometimes in conflict with Swedish norms and values. This includes gender segregation in certain contexts which contradicts Sweden's observation of gender equality. 

This is where things get tricky. My MIL does not want a man to bathe her and she has insisted over and over again that she does not feel comfortable or safe with this. However, from what we understand, they cannot discriminate against male workers and not allow this, so when a man comes up in rotation to come to her home when she needs to be bathed, that is who she gets. They have said that he can simply stand outside the bathroom while she bathes herself and came come in only if there is an emergency. But she does not feel safe with that either. We understand that if she had a police report on file that she had been the victim of sexual violence that they could make a plan ensuring she gets female homecare workers. However, she has none of this so the most she can do is to simply refuse to be bathed. This is what she did this morning and so she will have to wait another day to have a shower.

What's also underlies this rule is that it is also a way of ensuring the adherence of Swedish gender equality over religious values. Both homecare workers and elderly who observe gender segregation for religious reasons cannot do this when it comes to bathing and being bathed. I feel like what I am having a difficult time putting into words is a key difference between US and Swedish culture. In the US, religious freedom is a much stronger value than gender equality. The opposite is true in Sweden but in both systems, the strong adherence to these results in the disenfranchisement of vulnerable populations. 

I feel for my mother in law because I can see how I wouldn't feel comfortable in the same situation. If I were an elderly woman living alone and had limited mobility and strength, I wonder how I would handle being alone and naked in my home with a strange man washing me. I think I could get through it but it would evoke bad memories and old fears that I would hate to have to revisit on a regular basis at the end of my life. 

On a lighter note, this incident also brought out a funny language incident where I could not understand my MIL's Swedish because of dialectal difference. She normally speaks to me in English but when she is speaking in Swedish with someone here, like the homecare worker, she starts speaking to me in Swedish too. I often have trouble understanding her because my Swedish is limited, but this time I could not understand her because of her dialect. She was basically venting to me and kept saying a word that sounded like "shy" which I just could not understand. So I simply said in Swedish, I don't know what "shy" means. She translated it to "girl" a word I do know in Swedish that sounds like "shay". (For the language nerds, this is spelled "tjej". in Swedish). Once she said the English, I could understand that she was complaining about the fact that she had asked for a "girl" every time but they didn't send a "girl". If my Swedish were better, I probably could have figured out what she was saying but to be fair to myself, I would have used to word "woman" or "kvinna" in Swedish and so that was the word I was listening for. There is also another word for girl in Swedish that I know better than "tjej" which is "flicka" and I know I would have understood that.