It’s hot, humid and the guy in front of me is chain smoking. I’m trying to remember not to put my bags of food down on the concrete floor because there are cockroaches running between the overflowing dumpsters we’re standing next to. The strange part about this is that I’m inside. I’m standing in line with about 90 other people, at 9:30am on a Tuesday morning, waiting to get into Beirut’s immigration jail on visiting day. Dipendra, the Nepali social worker who I’ve been helping out lately (see last blog) was unable to make it this week, so I asked him to give me the names of the Nepali prisoners he usually brings our food to so that I could get in to the jail and deliver the food myself. Dipendra gave me the name of one prisoner, who I’ll call Nisha, and told me to just give her all the food because she would distribute it to the handful of other Nepali women who were being held in there.
From the outside, this jail does not appear to exist. There is a busy round-a-bout traffic circle in this part of the city that has a large concrete overpass spanning it. On the side of one of the overpass’s abutments is a set of two large metal roll up doors. These doors are built right into the side of the abutment. Through these doors is the immigration jail. Well, actually, through these doors and down. The jail itself is under ground, under this busy intersection. There are no signs indicating that the jail is in there.
Just inside the roll up metal doors, which are big enough to fit a truck through, is a narrow ramp with a metal railing. There are overflowing garbage dumpsters lined up at the bottom of the ramp and people lined up on the ramp itself. At the top of the ramp is a door. Behind that door is the jail and in front of that door is a police officer, sitting at a desk, determining who will get in to visit that day. Along the ramp are a couple of guards who every so often yell at the people in line in Arabic. I don’t know what they are saying but it appears that they are trying to keep everyone in a straight line, since every time one of the guards yells, everyone in line straightens out. It could also be that none of the other people who are waiting in line know what the guard is saying either, but figure if they get into a straight line they are less likely to get in trouble. Either way, when I hear the guard yell, I get into a straight line with the rest of the people in line. Once in a while, someone tries to cut to the front of the line and the guards make them turn around and go back down.
The people I’m waiting in line with appear to be from a wide variety of countries throughout Africa, Asia and the Middle East. All with bags of groceries and bottles of water in hand, they are waiting to see friends or loved ones who have been sent to jail for some immigration violation. I’m not sure how many people are currently held in this jail but I do know that 600 of them are women who were migrant domestic workers. Most of these women were arrested for running away from abusive employers. More times than not, when a worker runs away, the employer will call up the police and falsely accuse the worker of stealing. Most times, the worker’s side of the story is never heard.
The line moves slowly. One hour into my wait and I’m about one third of the way up the ramp to the mysterious door. There’s nothing to do but lean on the rail and watch the people. I hear at least four different languages being spoken within earshot. Many of the women are dressed in traditional Indian saris and I guess that they are from Sri Lanka, since half of all of Lebanon’s migrant domestic workers are Sri Lankan.
Every so often a young Lebanese woman in super tight designer jeans, high heel shoes and badly dyed hair will walk up the ramp to the guards and the guards will let them go to the front of the line. This happens about 8 different times. All appear to flirt with the guards and go immediately to the front of the line. I try to convince myself that all of these women have a good reason why they deserve to go to the front of the line and that it’s just a coincidence that they all look the way they do.
These shenanigans, of course, make the wait feel that much longer. I watch the roaches run around as the two hour mark passes.
Before coming to the jail this morning, I asked Dipendra what Nisha, the woman I’m going into the prison to see, was arrested for. Dipendra tells me that Nisha, while working and living in her employer’s home, was grabbed and sexually abused by the son of her employer. On several occasions the son tried to rape her. The employer would not believe Nisha when she complained about the son, so Nisha felt it was better to run away rather than hang around waiting to get raped. Nisha was picked up by the police who really didn’t care to hear Nisha’s story, so here she sits in Beirut’s immigration jail, probably for a few months, then if the agency who set up her employment agrees to pay for a flight, Nisha will be deported back to Nepal. If the agent or the employer does not pay for the flight, then Nisha will sit in jail.
Finally, after about two hours and fifteen minutes, I make it to the officer who is sitting at the desk in front of the long coveted door to the prison. In front of the officer is a stack of printed off pages full of names of prisoners in both English and Arabic. I give the officer Nisha’s name and he starts looking through the stack of papers trying to find her. No wonder this takes so long. After a couple of minutes, I notice Nisha’s name on the list and point it out. The officer then pulls out a form that has about twenty spaces on it. The first three spaces are filled in with the names of the three people who were ahead of me in line and have already gone through the door. He writes down Nisha’s name and mine on the fourth line and tells me to wait just inside the door. Once inside the door, which is just a door to a really nasty, urine soaked stairwell, I wait with the other three people. One of the three people waiting tells me that we have to wait until all the lines on the form are filled with names, then the officer will go down and round those prisoners up and we can go to the visiting room and see them. OK, fair enough.
After about 30 minutes of standing in the urine stinking stairwell, the form fills up and down the stairs we go. At the bottom of the stairs is a guard who is looking through everyone’s grocery bags to see what they have brought, so now we wait a little bit longer. Why this wasn’t done during the two hour and fifteen minute wait is beyond me. When I finally get up to the guard he asks me what I have in the bag. I say, “Food and water.” He asks me what type of food and I tell him it’s “Manaeesh” which is basically a small cheese and vegetable pizza, of which I have eight. I also have four bottles of water and a heavy plastic travel bag for Nisha so when she gets deported she’ll have something to put her stuff in. He asks me if there is any cheese on the Manaeesh, to which I bewilderedly answer “yes”. He tells me that there is no cheese allowed today. I say, “What!?” and the guard repeats that there is no cheese allowed. I immediately tell him that I misspoke and that there is no cheese on the food that I have brought. He reaches into the bag, pulls out one of the little pizzas, opens it up and says, “Yes, cheese”. He then takes my bag of eight pizzas that were meant for women who they don’t feed in this prison and throws them into the corner. I then notice that there is a big pile of other people’s rejected grocery bags lying there too. All tossed aside because of the whim of this one guard. I look at him and say, “What the fuck?” He ignores it and tells me that I can now enter the room. I quickly regain my composure, realizing that not only will it be a waste of 2 ½ hours for me but that Nisha and her friends will get nothing out of it. At least I can still give her the water and the travel bag.
When I walk into the visiting room, I’m confused. The room is about 5 feet wide by 25 feet long. It’s more like a small hallway that is dimly lit by two fluorescent lights which have plastic covers on them that are yellowed with age. It’s stifling in this room. The far end of this small hallway is just plain dark. There doesn’t seem to be any windows to talk to anyone through except for a small, one foot by two foot hatch at the end of the wall that is cluttered with people passing what little groceries the guards let them in with through to the friends they came to see. Other than that, it appears to be just a wall that is made up of standard prison bars with a sheet of metal welded to it. It appears to just be a solid metal wall. Then I realize that the other visitors are walking up to the wall and talking. I can now see that the metal wall has a pattern of small, dot like holes drilled in it that you can just barely see through. The holes are about the size of the holes on a peg board you would use in your garage to hold up tools. You can just make out the shape of the person on the other side. Since I’ve never met Nisha before, I was hoping that her Nepali features would give her away so that I would know who she was, but now that I can barely see through the perforated wall, that won’t help me. I can see prisoners filing in and walking along the other side of the perforated metal wall, trying as hard as I am to see who’s on the other side. I decide the best thing to do is to call out her name. After I do, I see a tiny figure of a woman through the holes. She leans in close to the wall and I say her name again, quieter this time. She says something to me in Nepali and nods her head yes. I gesture to her to go to the hatch and then fight my way through the crowd to get to it. When I finally get to the hatch I can look through and see Nisha. She’s about 5 feet tall and at best weighs 90 pounds. I hand the bottles of water through the hatch to her, she takes them and then shakes my hand and says, “Namaskar” which I remember being a respectful greeting from traveling India the year before. I say Namaskar back to her and with a smile she turns and goes back into the prison. I leave the visiting room and head back up the nasty stairway to the entrance ramp where the line of people waiting is just as long as it had been when I arrived nearly three hours ago.
After leaving the prison, I meet with Dipendra and ask him why the guard would throw out my food because of it containing cheese. Dipendra shakes his head and tells me there is no rhyme or reason to it. He says that some days they will tell you that you can’t bring chicken in and on others it’s cheese. He says it’s all up to the guards. It makes me wonder if it wasn’t to deter people from visiting.
Dipendra and I walk along the busy, dusty streets near the prison and he tells me that he has to go to the police station to investigate the murder of a Nepali migrant domestic worker. The worker, who was found dead in the kitchen of her employer, had been shot in the abdomen. The police are saying that they had no suspects. Amazing, isn’t it. Shot dead in the kitchen of your employer, who doesn’t allow you to leave the house, and there are no suspects.
Every week I meet with Dipendra and every week there’s another horrible story. A female worker runs away because she’s overworked, under fed, beaten by her employer and hasn’t been paid in over 4 months. She runs because she knows it will never get any better, but once on the street she has nowhere to go. The police see her on the street and know that if she’s from Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Nepal or Ethiopia, she’s a migrant worker and chances are she’s running away. So off to jail she goes. Dipendra tells me of another worker, found dead in her employer’s house and the employer claims that she committed suicide because she was “homesick”. Dipendra speaks to the dead woman’s sister, who is also a migrant domestic worker in Lebanon. The sister tells Dipendra that her sister was being maltreated and beaten by the employer. Now she has to figure out how to take care of her sister’s children back in Nepal. The sister who “committed suicide because she was home sick” was 26 years old.
Dipendra tells me that there have been at least 10 Nepali migrant domestic women workers who have committed suicide in the last five years because of being “homesick”. Dipendra tells me that he doesn’t believe it. “Maybe one or two, but all ten? Why wouldn’t they just go home?” All of the official police reports state that the reason for death was suicide due to being homesick. Now, Dipendra tells me, four Nepali women have committed suicide in 2009 alone. And it’s only May.
A week or so later I met with Dipendra, a second man from the Non Resident Nepali Association and a third man from Dubai. The third man, who I will call Raji, is a wealthy businessman who works throughout the Middle East and has for years been using his financial and business influence to better the plight of the migrant domestic workers throughout the region. He has been offered the position of Consulate General for the United Arab Emirates by his home country but has turned it down because it would mean giving up his lucrative business. He tells me and Dipendra that, “if you have money, you have power. If you have power you can help people. If you don’t have any money, you’re not going to be able to help anyone.” Raji tells me that things are bad all over the Middle East for migrant domestic workers but that Lebanon is one of the worst, along with Qatar, where some 2,000 migrant domestic women workers are in prison. Raji tells me of a mafia ring he discovered in Qatar where agents will charge migrant workers large fees to come to the country promising visas and a good job. When the migrant worker arrives they find out that the visas did not come through, though they do have a job. The worker is usually at the job no more than a couple of days before the agent calls the police and tells them where they can arrest the worker. The worker ends up in jail and the police pay the agent a commission.
“That’s what I don’t understand.” I tell Raji. “Why would the governments of Qatar and Lebanon want to keep all of these migrant workers in jail? I would think it would cost them too much money to house all those prisoners. Wouldn’t it be cheaper for them to just deport these workers or let them go back to work?”
Raji leaned forward in his seat. “The governments of Lebanon and Qatar receive funding from the United Nations for every migrant domestic worker they imprison. The more women they arrest and hold, the more prisoners they have, the more money they make.”
Suddenly it was all clear.
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Monday, August 17, 2009
Lebanon's Shame: Part I: Migrant Domestic Worders
Walk down Hamra Street, one of Beirut’s main thoroughfares, on a Sunday afternoon and you will think that you’ve accidentally found your way to the streets of Manila. Instead of the usual fare of Lebanese pedestrians that are out and about during the week, the sidewalks are filled with Philippine women. Many of these women can be seen lining up at any one of the international phone call businesses or standing in line at the Western Union, waiting to wire money home to relatives. These women make up part of Lebanon’s more than 200,000 migrant domestic workers. In other words, women who have come from poverty stricken parts of the world to work as live-in maids for Lebanese families.
Lebanon is about ¾ the size of the state of Connecticut and has a population of about 4 million. The migrant domestic workers make up about 5% of the population. 82% of Lebanese women do not work.
The migrant domestic workers come to Lebanon primarily from poor countries such as Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea and Nepal and most send their earned wages back to their families in their home countries in the hopes of bettering the lives of the family members they left behind. Many of these women have children of their own who they have left in their home countries and will not see again for years to come. With the remittance received from the domestic workers, those families use the funds for everything from meeting basic needs, to sending a child to school. For many of the receiving countries, the remittance makes up a sizable amount of the country’s gross national income.
Migrant domestic workers who come to Lebanon are usually recruited by an agency that sets the worker up with a “sponsor” (employer). Both the sponsor and the worker end up paying hefty fees to the agency and government for permits, visas and airfare. Once in Lebanon, the employer takes and holds the worker’s passport and is the only one the worker can work for. In exchange, the employer is responsible for taking care of the worker’s food, sleeping quarters and medical needs. For many of the migrant domestic workers, this arrangement works out well. However, many others find themselves working as slaves, serving prison time or dead.
While most of these women are hired as live-in maids, their jobs quickly include not only cleaning the house and cooking but also caring for their employer’s children or elderly parents, shopping, running errands and walking their pets. Many are forced to clean the houses of the employer’s relatives for no additional pay.
According to a 2006 study done by Dr. Ray Jureidini for the International Labor Organization, 56% of the migrant domestic workers in Lebanon sampled reported working more than 12 hours a day. Some were found to be working as much as 19 hours a day, but the average was around 16-17 hours a day. 34% reported not having any days off and most reported being paid between $100-$150 a month. (The cost of living in Beirut is only slightly less than that of most cities in the US)
A previous study, done in 2001, showed that 22% of Philippine domestic workers had their pay withheld, 15% had their food withheld, 14% were confined to the house and never allowed to leave, 17% were physically abused and 8% were sexually abused.
The non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch reports that Lebanon’s migrant domestic worker population is “unprotected by (Lebanese) labor laws and are subjected to exploitation and frequent abuses by employers and agencies. The most common complaints made by the workers include non-payment or delayed payment of wages, forced confinement to the workplace, no time off, and verbal, as well as, physical abuse”. Lebanese labor laws do not grant any rights to migrant domestic workers for days off or limit the number of hours they can be made to work in a day. Lebanese law also makes it very difficult for the worker to leave or change employers even in cases of physical and sexual abuse. Many migrant domestic workers find themselves between a rock and a hard place. If they are being abused, their only recourse ends up being to run away. If they run away from their employer’s home they are now viewed by Lebanese law to be illegal aliens without out any identification, because their abusive employer still holds their passport. Many of the abused women who run away find shelter in safe houses set up by non governmental agencies and religious organizations, but most are arrested by the police and spend months in jail, many serving sentences longer than ruled by the courts.
Some of the stories are horrifying. A Sri Lankan woman who was not allowed to leave the house or contact her family for 9 years and 8 of those years she received no pay, essentially working as a slave. When she finally was able to run away the Lebanese courts only required the employer to pay a settlement. Apparently slavery is not a crime here in Lebanon. When fighting during the Lebanese civil war reached its peak in the 1980s many Lebanese families fled, leaving their migrant domestic workers behind, locked up in their apartments with no food, for months at a time. This would happen again during the war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006. The families would return to Lebanon to find the worker starving to death, some surviving only by having food thrown to them from other balconies of the building. Apparently, treating another human worse than you would an animal is not a crime here either.
Human Rights Watch further reports that “at least 45 migrant domestic workers died in Lebanon in 2008, a majority of whom committed suicide or died while trying to escape” the home of their abusive employers. A number of workers have gone so far as to throw themselves from the balconies of the high rise apartment buildings they have been locked up in.
While the Lebanese government has recently started to address some of these issues, it is doubtful that any laws, even if passed, will be enforced.
A friend of mine, here in Beirut, who I volunteered with teaching English at one of the Palestinian refugee camps, asked me if I would be interested in trying to help out the migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. Of course I would, but where do we start? Fortunately for us, we had a list. A former American expat teacher who used to live in Beirut had compiled a contact list of non-governmental organizations, church groups and community leaders who have spent years trying to help with the plight of Lebanon’s migrant domestic worker population. On the contact list was a note stating that most of these groups were interested in learning English. That seemed easy enough to help out with, but we decided to contact them and do a full assessment of what their needs were. What we found out was that English tutoring was just the tip of the iceberg.
I started off by contacting Pastor Ayana, who is Habasha, an ethnic group of people located in Ethiopia and Eritrea. (Her name has been changed to protect her identity) Pastor Ayana’s services are held every Sunday in a church borrowed from another congregation in the Dora neighborhood of Beirut. She also runs several safe houses for abused, runaway migrant domestic workers and arranges for these women to find work again when she can. Pastor Ayana told me that English lessons and computer skills tutoring would be very welcomed to the people of her congregation. She also mentioned that she could use help in finding donations to help support the safe houses she runs, buy food for the women staying in the safe houses and have help buying and bringing food to the women who are held in prison for being runaways.
“Bring them food?” I asked, “Don’t they feed the women in prison.” Well come to find out, they do, but not very much. Sometimes they only get rice or potatoes and often the women become malnourished while stuck in prison. Pastor Ayana explained to me that when the migrant domestic workers get abused and runaway from their employers many of them come to her for help. This is because in the past, the abused workers have run to their embassies for help and the embassies have just turned them over to the police, which, of course, lands them in jail. Pastor Ayana will take in as many women as she can (she showed me video of one of the safe houses, with 16 women living together in a one bedroom apartment, all sleeping on mattresses on the floor, 3 and 4 to a bed, some sleeping head to toe to fit on the mattress) and since many people in that area know about her, many potential employers come around as well. The potential employers come around looking to hire the women from the safe houses as maids because now they won’t have to pay any middleman fees to the agencies. They also know that these women are in such a tough situation, especially due to not having a passport anymore, that they will work for less than the already low rates they were being paid. The new employers also don’t have to sign any type of contract with these women because they are considered “illegals”, and this opens them up to more abuse.
The next person I contacted was a man named Ezekiel from one of the many Sudanese churches in Lebanon. (His name has also been changed to protect his identity)Ezekiel and I sat under the shady canopy of a banyan tree near one of the entrance gates to the American University of Beirut. Ezekiel told me of his home in Sudan and how his “mother tongue” was a language called Kawalinb Nuba; however, he was also fluent in Arabic and English. Ezekiel also told me that English and computer tutoring would be greatly appreciated. He told me that there is a doctor who is a friend of his church who often helps them out with medical assistance but so much more is needed, especially when it involves an emergency and they cannot bring people to the hospital without fear of being arrested. Ezekiel then went on to tell me about their need to provide child care and schooling for the undocumented children who are not allowed to go to school in Lebanon, food for prisoners and vocational training for refugees wanting to return home. Wait. What did he just say? It was then that I realized that all this time Ezekiel wasn’t just talking about trying to help out the migrant domestic workers from Sudan but also the many refugees who had come to Lebanon both documented and undocumented. Needless to say, if the live-in maids of Lebanon have no rights, you can imagine the predicament of the refugees. My head began to swim with the thought of how extensive the needs of this community are and the amount of resources that would be needed to address their problems. It would take the effort of, well, a government to help fix this and I was quickly realizing that the Lebanese government was the one entity that wasn’t helping.
I made no promises to Ezekiel, because, as he told me in our conversation, many people come and make promises to help but then they are never heard from again. I told him I would see what I could do and get back to him.
From there I hopped in a shared taxi and headed to Dora, the part of Beirut where many migrant domestic workers live. There, in front of the Western Union, I met up with Dipendra Uprety. Dipendra is a clean cut, 5 foot 4, Nepalese man, maybe in his 30s. He always wears a clean, white button up shirt even when it’s 90 degrees and 90% humidity out. Dipendra came to Beirut as a migrant domestic worker himself in 1998 in hopes of sending wages back home to Nepal so that his younger brother and sister could go to school. Dipendra paid an agent $3,500 to “sponsor” him and in return, the agent was to get all the appropriate visas and work permits so Dipendra could find a job in Beirut. As happens so many times in Beirut by unscrupulous agents, the man took Dipendra’s money but never came through with the paperwork. Dipendra found himself in Beirut with no job and no money. He had no choice but to find work without proper paperwork and lay low. This lasted for a couple of years, but then one day he got asked for his papers by the police and wound up in jail for 5 months. The jail Dipendra was sent to was the General Security Immigration Jail, the same one all migrant domestic workers get sent to if they get caught running away or working without papers. While in the jail, Dipendra saw the suffering and terrible conditions the workers were subjected to. He also saw how nasty the jail itself is. From street level there is nothing visible since the jail is underground. There is a concrete overpass on top of it and it looks more like a bunker than a jail.
With the help of a Baptist Pastor and $6,000 in donated funds, Dipendra found freedom, a new job, a work visa and God. He vowed from that day on that he would work to help the migrant domestic workers who had been abused and imprisoned. So, every day he bought food with his own money, cooked and brought meals to the Immigration jail for the prisoners. He did this until the police tried to arrest him for it. “Helping people out is not a crime,” he told them. They didn’t care. It took the intervention of the Pastor and the Nepalese Consulate to keep him out of jail again. This time the Consulate made him an honorary diplomat, complete with diplomatic ID to keep him out of trouble. Now he moves freely in and out of the jail, serving as a translator for the arrested Nepalese and trying to get their side of the story heard in court. (Often only the employer’s side of the story would make it into the police reports and court). Dipendra works most days volunteering down at the jail translating from about 9am to 2pm. After that, he heads to his regular job cooking at a restaurant from 3pm to midnight. I had to admit, the guy’s got energy.
Dipendra and I walked a few blocks and headed up into a small, dingy apartment that had part of its living room blocked off from the rest of the apartment by a curtain. There was a family sitting on the other side of the curtain going about their daily business. The portion of the living room we were standing in was the home to the local Non Resident Nepali Association, of which Dipendra was the President. (I would later find out that there are other branches of this Association throughout the Middle East). Two other Nepali men would join us and when we sat down; Dipendra smiled at me and said, “You’re the first non Nepali person to ever come to this meeting room.” He went on to tell me that every Sunday at least 60 Nepali people crowd into this little 12’x20’ room, many out on the stairway leading up to it, to talk about problems and give each other support. Dipendra said that one day he hoped to get a larger room to meet in.
Dipendra ran through pretty much the same list of needs that the other community leaders had mentioned: English and computer tutoring, food for prisoners, funding for safe houses and funding to get prisoners out of prison. He also mentioned that he would like someone to come with him as a “witness” when he’s dealing with some of the employers of abused migrant workers because he said that often they will say one thing to him and then deny it later. He also said that he wished he had someone who could take the letters he writes to lawyers, journalist and embassies and put them into proper English (his English is not that fluent). I realized that these last two items were things that I could definitely help him with and told him so. When we finally left the apartment/meeting hall, we walked out into the Dora neighborhood of Beirut. Before saying our goodbyes, Dipendra told me I should come back to Dora on a Sunday afternoon. “The neighborhood is full of Sri Lankans on Sundays, it’s very nice.”
While I was contacting these community leaders, two of my friends were also going out and doing a needs assessment on a handful of other groups. They came up with the same list of needs and complaints of abuse as I did.
A day or two later, I received a phone call from Dipendra asking me if I could meet him at the Philippine Embassy in Beirut to help him with a runaway migrant domestic worker. Since people usually call Dipendra up to help translate in Nepali, I asked why the Philippine Consulate, since I knew he didn’t speak Philippine. Dipendra told me that after the worker ran away, someone offered to drive her to her embassy. The driver assumed she was Philippine. The Philippine Embassy recognized her as being Nepali and called the Nepali Consulate who in turn called Dipendra.
When we arrived at the Philippine Embassy, we were directed to a petite 5 foot nothing tall young Nepali woman who looked terrified. She probably weighed 90 pounds soaking wet. She began moving backwards as we approached, so I immediately stopped and let Dipendra continue going forward. She calmed down when she heard him speak Nepali to her. We found out that she was 20 years old and had just arrived in Beirut 3 days ago. She ran away because she said her employer was very mean to her. (As the ILO report exposed, it is common for employers to be exceptionally harsh on migrant domestic workers in the first few weeks to try and “train” the workers into submission as if they were animals). Fortunately, Dipendra was able to get a hold of the agent who had brokered her job and with much persuasion, convinced him to find her a new employer so that the police wouldn’t be looking for her. All three of us hopped in a cab and headed to the agents office where the agent and another Lebanese man were waiting. The agent explained that the Lebanese man was to be her new employer. When Dipendra and I went to leave, the girl began to follow. Dipendra had to explain to her that she had to stay and couldn’t come with us. It was so sad having to look at her face as Dipendra told her she would now have to go with this other Lebanese employer. It was like abandoning a child.
Over the next four months I would receive emails from Dipendra asking me to edit letters and help bring food to the jail with him. I would edit one or two letters a week for him and on a number of occasions, I would go to the jail with him to bring food. At the prison, Tuesdays and Thursdays are visiting days. On those days you can see hundreds of people lining up to get into the prison to see loved ones and friends who are being held there. The variety of ethnic backgrounds in this line is amazing. And each person in line has several bags of groceries to bring to those hungry prisoners on the inside. I’m told it takes a long time to wait in that line to bring the food in and visit with one of the prisoners. But because Dipendra carries a diplomatic ID with him he doesn’t have to wait in line and can go through a different door and see his “clients”. I unfortunately, cannot follow. Each time that I tell Dipendra that I want to wait in line to get in, he tells me it’s just easier for me to give him the food and let him go through the diplomat door. He tells me this with a look that says, “Why would you want to go in there?” So Dipendra and I chat at the door for a while, then I hand him my bags of food and off he goes, down into the underground bowels of the Immigration Jail. Each time I watch the door close and tell myself, one of these days I’m going to see what it’s like in there.
Lebanon is about ¾ the size of the state of Connecticut and has a population of about 4 million. The migrant domestic workers make up about 5% of the population. 82% of Lebanese women do not work.
The migrant domestic workers come to Lebanon primarily from poor countries such as Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Ethiopia, Sudan, Eritrea and Nepal and most send their earned wages back to their families in their home countries in the hopes of bettering the lives of the family members they left behind. Many of these women have children of their own who they have left in their home countries and will not see again for years to come. With the remittance received from the domestic workers, those families use the funds for everything from meeting basic needs, to sending a child to school. For many of the receiving countries, the remittance makes up a sizable amount of the country’s gross national income.
Migrant domestic workers who come to Lebanon are usually recruited by an agency that sets the worker up with a “sponsor” (employer). Both the sponsor and the worker end up paying hefty fees to the agency and government for permits, visas and airfare. Once in Lebanon, the employer takes and holds the worker’s passport and is the only one the worker can work for. In exchange, the employer is responsible for taking care of the worker’s food, sleeping quarters and medical needs. For many of the migrant domestic workers, this arrangement works out well. However, many others find themselves working as slaves, serving prison time or dead.
While most of these women are hired as live-in maids, their jobs quickly include not only cleaning the house and cooking but also caring for their employer’s children or elderly parents, shopping, running errands and walking their pets. Many are forced to clean the houses of the employer’s relatives for no additional pay.
According to a 2006 study done by Dr. Ray Jureidini for the International Labor Organization, 56% of the migrant domestic workers in Lebanon sampled reported working more than 12 hours a day. Some were found to be working as much as 19 hours a day, but the average was around 16-17 hours a day. 34% reported not having any days off and most reported being paid between $100-$150 a month. (The cost of living in Beirut is only slightly less than that of most cities in the US)
A previous study, done in 2001, showed that 22% of Philippine domestic workers had their pay withheld, 15% had their food withheld, 14% were confined to the house and never allowed to leave, 17% were physically abused and 8% were sexually abused.
The non-governmental organization Human Rights Watch reports that Lebanon’s migrant domestic worker population is “unprotected by (Lebanese) labor laws and are subjected to exploitation and frequent abuses by employers and agencies. The most common complaints made by the workers include non-payment or delayed payment of wages, forced confinement to the workplace, no time off, and verbal, as well as, physical abuse”. Lebanese labor laws do not grant any rights to migrant domestic workers for days off or limit the number of hours they can be made to work in a day. Lebanese law also makes it very difficult for the worker to leave or change employers even in cases of physical and sexual abuse. Many migrant domestic workers find themselves between a rock and a hard place. If they are being abused, their only recourse ends up being to run away. If they run away from their employer’s home they are now viewed by Lebanese law to be illegal aliens without out any identification, because their abusive employer still holds their passport. Many of the abused women who run away find shelter in safe houses set up by non governmental agencies and religious organizations, but most are arrested by the police and spend months in jail, many serving sentences longer than ruled by the courts.
Some of the stories are horrifying. A Sri Lankan woman who was not allowed to leave the house or contact her family for 9 years and 8 of those years she received no pay, essentially working as a slave. When she finally was able to run away the Lebanese courts only required the employer to pay a settlement. Apparently slavery is not a crime here in Lebanon. When fighting during the Lebanese civil war reached its peak in the 1980s many Lebanese families fled, leaving their migrant domestic workers behind, locked up in their apartments with no food, for months at a time. This would happen again during the war between Hezbollah and Israel in 2006. The families would return to Lebanon to find the worker starving to death, some surviving only by having food thrown to them from other balconies of the building. Apparently, treating another human worse than you would an animal is not a crime here either.
Human Rights Watch further reports that “at least 45 migrant domestic workers died in Lebanon in 2008, a majority of whom committed suicide or died while trying to escape” the home of their abusive employers. A number of workers have gone so far as to throw themselves from the balconies of the high rise apartment buildings they have been locked up in.
While the Lebanese government has recently started to address some of these issues, it is doubtful that any laws, even if passed, will be enforced.
A friend of mine, here in Beirut, who I volunteered with teaching English at one of the Palestinian refugee camps, asked me if I would be interested in trying to help out the migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. Of course I would, but where do we start? Fortunately for us, we had a list. A former American expat teacher who used to live in Beirut had compiled a contact list of non-governmental organizations, church groups and community leaders who have spent years trying to help with the plight of Lebanon’s migrant domestic worker population. On the contact list was a note stating that most of these groups were interested in learning English. That seemed easy enough to help out with, but we decided to contact them and do a full assessment of what their needs were. What we found out was that English tutoring was just the tip of the iceberg.
I started off by contacting Pastor Ayana, who is Habasha, an ethnic group of people located in Ethiopia and Eritrea. (Her name has been changed to protect her identity) Pastor Ayana’s services are held every Sunday in a church borrowed from another congregation in the Dora neighborhood of Beirut. She also runs several safe houses for abused, runaway migrant domestic workers and arranges for these women to find work again when she can. Pastor Ayana told me that English lessons and computer skills tutoring would be very welcomed to the people of her congregation. She also mentioned that she could use help in finding donations to help support the safe houses she runs, buy food for the women staying in the safe houses and have help buying and bringing food to the women who are held in prison for being runaways.
“Bring them food?” I asked, “Don’t they feed the women in prison.” Well come to find out, they do, but not very much. Sometimes they only get rice or potatoes and often the women become malnourished while stuck in prison. Pastor Ayana explained to me that when the migrant domestic workers get abused and runaway from their employers many of them come to her for help. This is because in the past, the abused workers have run to their embassies for help and the embassies have just turned them over to the police, which, of course, lands them in jail. Pastor Ayana will take in as many women as she can (she showed me video of one of the safe houses, with 16 women living together in a one bedroom apartment, all sleeping on mattresses on the floor, 3 and 4 to a bed, some sleeping head to toe to fit on the mattress) and since many people in that area know about her, many potential employers come around as well. The potential employers come around looking to hire the women from the safe houses as maids because now they won’t have to pay any middleman fees to the agencies. They also know that these women are in such a tough situation, especially due to not having a passport anymore, that they will work for less than the already low rates they were being paid. The new employers also don’t have to sign any type of contract with these women because they are considered “illegals”, and this opens them up to more abuse.
The next person I contacted was a man named Ezekiel from one of the many Sudanese churches in Lebanon. (His name has also been changed to protect his identity)Ezekiel and I sat under the shady canopy of a banyan tree near one of the entrance gates to the American University of Beirut. Ezekiel told me of his home in Sudan and how his “mother tongue” was a language called Kawalinb Nuba; however, he was also fluent in Arabic and English. Ezekiel also told me that English and computer tutoring would be greatly appreciated. He told me that there is a doctor who is a friend of his church who often helps them out with medical assistance but so much more is needed, especially when it involves an emergency and they cannot bring people to the hospital without fear of being arrested. Ezekiel then went on to tell me about their need to provide child care and schooling for the undocumented children who are not allowed to go to school in Lebanon, food for prisoners and vocational training for refugees wanting to return home. Wait. What did he just say? It was then that I realized that all this time Ezekiel wasn’t just talking about trying to help out the migrant domestic workers from Sudan but also the many refugees who had come to Lebanon both documented and undocumented. Needless to say, if the live-in maids of Lebanon have no rights, you can imagine the predicament of the refugees. My head began to swim with the thought of how extensive the needs of this community are and the amount of resources that would be needed to address their problems. It would take the effort of, well, a government to help fix this and I was quickly realizing that the Lebanese government was the one entity that wasn’t helping.
I made no promises to Ezekiel, because, as he told me in our conversation, many people come and make promises to help but then they are never heard from again. I told him I would see what I could do and get back to him.
From there I hopped in a shared taxi and headed to Dora, the part of Beirut where many migrant domestic workers live. There, in front of the Western Union, I met up with Dipendra Uprety. Dipendra is a clean cut, 5 foot 4, Nepalese man, maybe in his 30s. He always wears a clean, white button up shirt even when it’s 90 degrees and 90% humidity out. Dipendra came to Beirut as a migrant domestic worker himself in 1998 in hopes of sending wages back home to Nepal so that his younger brother and sister could go to school. Dipendra paid an agent $3,500 to “sponsor” him and in return, the agent was to get all the appropriate visas and work permits so Dipendra could find a job in Beirut. As happens so many times in Beirut by unscrupulous agents, the man took Dipendra’s money but never came through with the paperwork. Dipendra found himself in Beirut with no job and no money. He had no choice but to find work without proper paperwork and lay low. This lasted for a couple of years, but then one day he got asked for his papers by the police and wound up in jail for 5 months. The jail Dipendra was sent to was the General Security Immigration Jail, the same one all migrant domestic workers get sent to if they get caught running away or working without papers. While in the jail, Dipendra saw the suffering and terrible conditions the workers were subjected to. He also saw how nasty the jail itself is. From street level there is nothing visible since the jail is underground. There is a concrete overpass on top of it and it looks more like a bunker than a jail.
With the help of a Baptist Pastor and $6,000 in donated funds, Dipendra found freedom, a new job, a work visa and God. He vowed from that day on that he would work to help the migrant domestic workers who had been abused and imprisoned. So, every day he bought food with his own money, cooked and brought meals to the Immigration jail for the prisoners. He did this until the police tried to arrest him for it. “Helping people out is not a crime,” he told them. They didn’t care. It took the intervention of the Pastor and the Nepalese Consulate to keep him out of jail again. This time the Consulate made him an honorary diplomat, complete with diplomatic ID to keep him out of trouble. Now he moves freely in and out of the jail, serving as a translator for the arrested Nepalese and trying to get their side of the story heard in court. (Often only the employer’s side of the story would make it into the police reports and court). Dipendra works most days volunteering down at the jail translating from about 9am to 2pm. After that, he heads to his regular job cooking at a restaurant from 3pm to midnight. I had to admit, the guy’s got energy.
Dipendra and I walked a few blocks and headed up into a small, dingy apartment that had part of its living room blocked off from the rest of the apartment by a curtain. There was a family sitting on the other side of the curtain going about their daily business. The portion of the living room we were standing in was the home to the local Non Resident Nepali Association, of which Dipendra was the President. (I would later find out that there are other branches of this Association throughout the Middle East). Two other Nepali men would join us and when we sat down; Dipendra smiled at me and said, “You’re the first non Nepali person to ever come to this meeting room.” He went on to tell me that every Sunday at least 60 Nepali people crowd into this little 12’x20’ room, many out on the stairway leading up to it, to talk about problems and give each other support. Dipendra said that one day he hoped to get a larger room to meet in.
Dipendra ran through pretty much the same list of needs that the other community leaders had mentioned: English and computer tutoring, food for prisoners, funding for safe houses and funding to get prisoners out of prison. He also mentioned that he would like someone to come with him as a “witness” when he’s dealing with some of the employers of abused migrant workers because he said that often they will say one thing to him and then deny it later. He also said that he wished he had someone who could take the letters he writes to lawyers, journalist and embassies and put them into proper English (his English is not that fluent). I realized that these last two items were things that I could definitely help him with and told him so. When we finally left the apartment/meeting hall, we walked out into the Dora neighborhood of Beirut. Before saying our goodbyes, Dipendra told me I should come back to Dora on a Sunday afternoon. “The neighborhood is full of Sri Lankans on Sundays, it’s very nice.”
While I was contacting these community leaders, two of my friends were also going out and doing a needs assessment on a handful of other groups. They came up with the same list of needs and complaints of abuse as I did.
A day or two later, I received a phone call from Dipendra asking me if I could meet him at the Philippine Embassy in Beirut to help him with a runaway migrant domestic worker. Since people usually call Dipendra up to help translate in Nepali, I asked why the Philippine Consulate, since I knew he didn’t speak Philippine. Dipendra told me that after the worker ran away, someone offered to drive her to her embassy. The driver assumed she was Philippine. The Philippine Embassy recognized her as being Nepali and called the Nepali Consulate who in turn called Dipendra.
When we arrived at the Philippine Embassy, we were directed to a petite 5 foot nothing tall young Nepali woman who looked terrified. She probably weighed 90 pounds soaking wet. She began moving backwards as we approached, so I immediately stopped and let Dipendra continue going forward. She calmed down when she heard him speak Nepali to her. We found out that she was 20 years old and had just arrived in Beirut 3 days ago. She ran away because she said her employer was very mean to her. (As the ILO report exposed, it is common for employers to be exceptionally harsh on migrant domestic workers in the first few weeks to try and “train” the workers into submission as if they were animals). Fortunately, Dipendra was able to get a hold of the agent who had brokered her job and with much persuasion, convinced him to find her a new employer so that the police wouldn’t be looking for her. All three of us hopped in a cab and headed to the agents office where the agent and another Lebanese man were waiting. The agent explained that the Lebanese man was to be her new employer. When Dipendra and I went to leave, the girl began to follow. Dipendra had to explain to her that she had to stay and couldn’t come with us. It was so sad having to look at her face as Dipendra told her she would now have to go with this other Lebanese employer. It was like abandoning a child.
Over the next four months I would receive emails from Dipendra asking me to edit letters and help bring food to the jail with him. I would edit one or two letters a week for him and on a number of occasions, I would go to the jail with him to bring food. At the prison, Tuesdays and Thursdays are visiting days. On those days you can see hundreds of people lining up to get into the prison to see loved ones and friends who are being held there. The variety of ethnic backgrounds in this line is amazing. And each person in line has several bags of groceries to bring to those hungry prisoners on the inside. I’m told it takes a long time to wait in that line to bring the food in and visit with one of the prisoners. But because Dipendra carries a diplomatic ID with him he doesn’t have to wait in line and can go through a different door and see his “clients”. I unfortunately, cannot follow. Each time that I tell Dipendra that I want to wait in line to get in, he tells me it’s just easier for me to give him the food and let him go through the diplomat door. He tells me this with a look that says, “Why would you want to go in there?” So Dipendra and I chat at the door for a while, then I hand him my bags of food and off he goes, down into the underground bowels of the Immigration Jail. Each time I watch the door close and tell myself, one of these days I’m going to see what it’s like in there.