I got a whiff of this phenomenon last fall when I was reporting on the Hajj pilgrimage and Mecca for The New Yorker. One evening, I walked into a small Internet café near my hotel. Two young Indian men managed the café. After I had answered my e-mails, I bought a coffee and we chatted. They were from Faizabad, a small town in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.
Sohail, the younger, a wiry man who served coffee and tea and cleaned the place, had been working there for a year. When I told him that I had been to his town several times as a reporter, his eyes brimmed with tears.
"I worked in a garage as a mechanic, but I didn't make enough. I got married and had a child. So I came here. I thought I am going to Mecca. I will get to perform the Hajj and earn a lot more than I ever would," he said. "I didn't know people here would treat us like dirt."
He pointed to a chubby Saudi boy, who was a regular at the café and called himself "Funky Monkey" (his video-game username). "Every time he feels like, he would slap me. It is the same with other local customers. You are a little late complying an order and they bark at you, slap you." He added, "Here you can't appeal to anyone. My passport is with my kafeel and I can only go home when he allows me to." Imran, the older counterman, consoled him. "You are here now! Get used to it. Do I cry? I haven't been able to return home in three years," Imran said.
"Why not?" I asked Imran.
"My kafeel has my passport. He keeps making excuses, delaying it. He doesn't want to lose business if I go away. And he has to pay all my money that is with him and buy me the return ticket home."
And yet, Imran said, "We still have it easy. Working here is much worse for the maids."
There are about one-and-a-half million female domestic workers in Saudi Arabia. "You would have heard about what happened to that Indonesian woman," Imran remarked.
I hadn't.
Sumiati Binti Salan Mustapa, I learned, was a twenty-three-year-old Indonesian maid who had been hospitalized in the Saudi city of Medina in November of 2010, after her employer had cut off her lips with scissors, burnt her back with an iron, pulped her legs with beatings, and broken a finger. Mustapa, who had been working in Medina for four months when she was hospitalized, told Indonesian diplomats that her employers had been beating her from the first day of work.
Days after her ordeal, Saudi employers murdered another Indonesian maid, the thirty-six-year-old Kikim Komalasari, whose body had been dumped in a garbage bin.
In yet another incident in the Saudi capital of Riyadh, a forty-nine-year-old Sri Lankan maid named Lahadapurage Daneris Ariyawathie had nails and metal objects hammered into her by her employers in March, 2010, after she complained of being overworked.
Such abuse is not an aberration, but is widespread throughout Saudi Arabia as well as other Middle Eastern countries. A 2010 Human Rights Watch report, "As If I Am Not Human," based on extensive interviews with domestic workers in Saudi Arabia as well as in their home countries, described conditions amounting to modern-day slavery:
Most domestic workers reported working 15-20 hours a day, typically with one hour of rest or no rest at all. None of the interviewees had a day off or paid leave. Domestic workers reported having to work even when ill or injured and had little access to health care. Furthermore, many domestic workers were employed in large houses but reported inadequate living accommodations, including having to sleep in areas such as storage closets, and in one case, a bathroom.
Sexual abuse of domestic workers by employers in Saudi Arabia seems not uncommon, according to the Human Rights Watch report. "Examples of abuse included beatings, deliberate burnings with hot irons, threats, insults, and forms of humiliation such as shaving a domestic worker's head. We interviewed women who reported rape, attempted rape, and sexual harassment, typically by male employers or their sons, and in some instances, by other foreign workers whom they had approached for assistance," the report added. An Indonesian woman named Darsem Binti Dawud was sentenced to death in 2009 after killing her employer, who she said was trying to rape her; she eventually returned home in July, 2011, after, according to Saudi tradition, the slain employer's family agreed to waive her death sentence in exchange for blood money—an amount of U.S. $549,900, which was paid by the Indonesian government.
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