The headline is horrific: "Saudi Throws Kenyan Maid Out Of Top Floor Window".
Sadly, the story that accompanies it is merely the latest addition to the ongoing revelation of the cruel exploitation faced by migrant workers in the oil-rich Middle East, and the especially vicious treatment of their household servants.
The news report details several incidents of Kenyan women suffering in their role as Shakala, "house-help", in Saudi Arabia. The tragic case referred to in the headline alleges that she was pushed off the third floor while hanging out clothes on a clothesline. "You are better off dead", she claims she heard her employer say right before he shoved her out the building; luckily she landed in a nearby pool rather than on the pavement, although the fall caused her to be hospitalized nevertheless. She says that while she was employed there, the man's children had often sexually exploited her. Enduring the labor for five months, she had only been paid for one.
Other Kenyan maids reveal more of the inexplicably sadisistic treatment they suffered at the hands of their employers: one woman was reduced to eating dog food to sustain herself, after working for 22 hours a day and receiving so little food for her labors. They say that they know of 100 other Kenyan women who are now homeless in Jeddah, stranded after being dismissed from their jobs.
“Their children insult us. We were never let out of the house and for the three months I was there [in Jeddah], I did not see the sun. I only saw it when I landed in Nairobi. I fainted on alighting,” she said.
These stories are not rare, but they differ in their degrees of misery. A Phillipino woman was punched, kicked and beaten with nightsticks and steel tubes, at a police station no less, by her employer and his sons. A particularly extreme case was reported back in 2007, where an Indonesian housemaid was so badly beaten and tortured by the Saudi married couple that abused her that she had to have her hands and feet amputated.
In the face of such a despairing existence, many of the immigrant workers choose suicide as the lesser of evils. Neighboring Kuwait is seeing a wave of suicides and attempts at suicide; examples include a Sri Lankan housemaid tried to kill herself by drinking detergent, while another hung herself after going months without receiving any pay for her work. A woman of unidentified origin grew so despondant that she poured gasolene over herself and set herself on fire as a final act of escape. (A photo gallery of examples of the appalling living conditions that trapped servants are forced to live under has been posted here.)
Last September, the nation of Indonesia grew so concerned over the treatment of its citizens at the hands of Kuwaitis, that it banned its women from working there as maids. The ban is now being tentatively lifted after the signing of a "Memorandum of Understanding", promising better treatment of foreign workers in Kuwait. A similar ban had been in place to Saudi Arabia, after the Indonesian embassy received hundreds of complaints of torture, mostly from housemaids.
330 Sri Lankan maids were reported to have died in the region in 2009, according to the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment (SLBFE). How many Indians, Philipinos, Indonesians, Pakistanis, and Kenyans will end up being added to the total?[Thanks to the valiant Migrant Rights website for many of the links in this post]
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