Name: Maid in Lebanon: 'My employer treats me like a slave' - BBC News
Uploaded: 2021-02-28T18:36:47.000Z
Duration: 5 min 43 s
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Past simple

It's been a long, hard journey for Lucy it For a year she worked in Lebanon, a dream that quickly turned into a nightmare of abuse.

Now, safely back home in Sierra Leone, she's warning other women not to go.

85% of the people that live in my country have their daily bread from their family members that work up God, that is one of my dreams.

But I found out that there is a difference of working in the Middle East and working in some of the other countries.

Domestic maids are largely at the mercy of their employers, and human rights groups say Lebanon's economic collapse and Covid, 19, has made a bad situation even worse.

This scene is a snapshot of what's happening right across the Middle East.

Yeah, last summer, women were being dumped outside their embassies in Beirut because families said they couldn't afford the wages.

The Lebanese government wouldn't tell us whether anyone had been prosecuted for ditching their worker.

I'm heading to a safe house to meet a group of domestic maids in Lebanon.

Those that run away from abuse risk becoming illegal because their visa is tied to the family they work for.

And that's why the height I wake up at four o'clock in the morning.

If I said today for them to give me my cell again, they locked me from the bathroom.

They told me there is no dollar, no money in Lebanon.

I want to go back home to my country for me to go and take care of my son.

I just want to say that to the Lebanese people that let them stop to treat us like this.

Because they value Dawg cuts more than us.

All the women we spoke to have now been repatriated.

A quarter of a million foreign domestic maids work in Lebanon cities and towns cooking and cleaning mostly unseen in homes across the country.

Many in Lebanon see nothing wrong with the system that provides cheap labor.

Of course, there is some Lebanese family is not good at, Of course, everywhere these people like that.

Well, I spoke to one domestic, NATO said she wasn't even allowed to sleep in her room.

These cases, very few, most of them the majority are happy with their families in Lebanon.

But the Lebanese government knows there's a problem.

Last year, they tried to introduce a new contract that would give domestic maids greater protection.

It's pretty extraordinary that you have to write in law.

A domestic maids is allowed to take phone calls from her own family.

We think it's the right of any person to be free to receive a call from his family.

But we are afraid maybe in some house they don't respect this rights.

And back in Sierra Leone, Lucy continues her campaign warning women of their abuses.

I make a triangle in the morning but I know you go again.

Now I am doing this job and I'm not getting paid.

I'm not getting anything at the end, but like I'm getting what is more than noon trying to save lives.

 But poverty will always propel people far from home, even to countries where they have few rights. 