"Why is it that people manage perfectly well in the first world without live in maids and yet when those same people move to the Middle/Far East/Africa, they suddenly need one."
Good answer Appletrees. Add to this Sand storms, heavy winter rainfall by the coast in Alex anyway, turns all dust to thick concretous mud.
I lived to a 'good standard of living' apparently (only missing my human rights to freedom etc etc, but by the by..)
Let me tell you, if you want to make food, any food over there, you have to do everything from scratch. There is no such thing as convenience food.
Microwave meal.... what's a microwave? any pre-prepared food in the freezer section of the supermarket will not have been frozen properly. It's well known that the supermarkets switch off the power at night... cos they are so ignorant of how to keep food.
Microwaves are available, but they generally break, and not really worth it.
You want to make a tomato based sauce?... unless you wanted to spend £3.50 on a tin of imported chopped tomatoes... Get chopping!
When I was first there, I couldn't even get stock cubes.
Literally everything i needed to make needed to be seasonal, and in its natural form. Frozen veg is tasteless, only very expensive imported veg is palatable. Weaning DS at one point the poor mite was restricted to mango, morning noon and night, there was nothing else ready.... (August) his nappies were very pretty and very fragrant though!
Mostly, if you wanted peas, you get shelling!
For the first 6m we couldn't even go to the supermarket, we would have been seen coming back with bags from the supermarket and that would have started gossip.. I kid you not.. open insane asylum.
In Alex we did a couple of supermarkets, but the prices were so often beyond the local purse that they treated them like a leisure activity, large groups of them sightseeing in the Hair Conditioner section... most women there wouldn't use conditioner, only oil to smooth their hair. Paying the equivalent of 5 falafel sandwiches for a bottle of hair stuff was something to gawk at.
Men have also conditioned local women to believe that a washing machine doesn't actually get clothes clean. 
I had a lovely machine though, but again only after 6m. For the first 6m, with a 6m old baby, it was a bucket and soap.
I did have women in to help once or twice, when I was momentarily PG, to help cook and clean, but they tried to steal stuff, I caught them, and they always helped themselves to my perfume... [grr] So in the end, I rapidly realised it wasn't worth it. it was back breaking work to live there. No wonder I lost 3 PGs. men out there don't help... it's unmanly to do so 
That said, many local women of an average level would have a girl to help them cook/clean. They see it as a form of charity. there is no social welfare system, women are supposed to be looked after by their father, their husband. Treatment of these workers is usually abysmal, they are harsh enough on their own children, domestics can suffer horrific abuse, and little is done about it and the domestic is scared to leave as she will have no money to live.
I recall a particularly lively debate on domestic staff started by one notoriously prickly expat about how marvellous she felt she was as she was employing a 10 yo girl. I told her there and then that if she wanted to pat herself on the back, to stop telling her to do the heavy lifting and to put her into school [FFS]
Like I said, I've been banned from all of the local expat yahoo group.... 
[well worth it emoticon]