Dhe promise of a better life abroad was not kept for Jeannie. She lives again in a corrugated iron shack in a poor, remote town in the north of the Philippines. At the beginning of the year she returned from the very rich Emirate of Qatar. She had taken a job there as a nanny. But exploitation replaced the poverty she wanted to escape from.
Jeannie reports that she did not have to take care of a two-year-old girl, as actually stipulated in the contract, but of six children. She was bossed around not only by the master of the house and his wife, but also by the older daughters and sons. “I had to wash, cook and clean. I slept in a windowless closet. My nights were short because my work often started at four in the morning,” she says.
Jeannie worked 15 hours a day, seven days a week for $400 a month. She endured all of this until one Saturday morning, when she narrowly escaped being raped: “I was in the bathroom when the master of the house suddenly came in. I realized that I was alone in the house with him. Everyone else was on the way. I was trapped,” says Jeannie. “He looked at me greedily and said, ‘You look beautiful.’ Then he grabbed me, held me and pulled up my dress. I screamed louder than ever in my life. I pushed him aside with all my might and ran out of the bathroom.”
As a rule, the conditions on the stadium construction sites are the focus when Qatar is criticized for the exploitation of foreign guest workers from Asia or Africa. The soccer World Cup, which starts in two weeks, has put a spotlight on their fate. The conditions under which more than 170,000 domestic workers work are rarely mentioned. Many are not only repeatedly victims of exploitation, but also of sexual violence. They live with employers to whom they are often defenseless. And even if Qatar, as the host of the World Cup, may be a particularly exposed target for criticism from human rights organizations – the country is anything but an outlier in the region. Conditions are even worse in other Arab Gulf states. Even in Lebanon, where the upper classes like to show off their cosmopolitan side, some families treat domestic workers like serfs.
fear and uncertainty
At the airports in the region, for example, you often come across groups of young women waiting for their passports to be taken from them. Teenage African women with fear and uncertainty written all over their faces. You meet women like Jeannie from the Philippines who spend decades raising the children of strangers while they can visit their own at most once a year. If any. One sees South Asian women in Beirut being forced into maid costumes in which to walk their “Madames’ dogs” through the affluent neighborhoods. Stories about harassment or beatings are heard over and over again about women who cannot be seen. And ones that show that not all women have been able to escape their rapists.
