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.