A friend, who is also Kuwaiti, came into my office, eyes wide, full of regret. She had been employing an undocumented cleaner. Someone she describes as one of many who “fall through the cracks of the outdated, extortionate, unjust Kafala (or sponsorship, work permit system used in this region including my Kuwait) ) system.” She grew up in a household with house help; she was not not unware of how it works. Yet when her cleaner did not show up several days in a row to work, my friend tried to do some investigating. Through a network of people connected to her cleaner, she was able to piece together a chain of events, locate the prison where she was being held, and eventually, secure her release.
Here she describes her experience with the quagmire of having a part time worker in and out of her home.
“My cleaner came to this Qatar under the Kafala of a cleaning company. She paid them a huge fee to come to Qatar to earn a living. When she arrived, she went through all the procedures to complete her sponsorship papers, finger prints, blood tests, photographs etc. she was given a photocopy of an official looking large stamp in her passport and told this said she was legitimately a resident. She was then told to find her own work, but to check in every two years to pay another large sum of money to update and renew her sponsorship, which she did. Little did she know they’d taken her money, and reported her as a ‘runaway’ and never completed her sponsorship papers.
When her flat was raided by the police, she naively showed the police the photocopy of the visa in her passport that she was given by the company. The one that said she had legal sponsorship. She was still taken to prison. They took away her phone. She had no access to the number of the company, her purported sponsors. She asked the police to call her sponsors. They repeated her only concern should be that she’s being deported.
In the meantime, on the outside, I was trying to do everything I could to secure her stay in the country. I called her ‘sponsors’ office to see if they’d agree to transfer the sponsorship to me. They denied ever knowing her.”
Her experience is one that speaks to the volumes of people who are caught by the middle men; the brokers who promise sponsorship and vanish. As she observes: “In a transient place where employers and employees have a high turnover such as here….there so much quick money to be made from it. I see prisons full of cleaning ladies.”
My friend didn’t want me to write about this until she had guaranteed her cleaner safe passage home. Her impassioned arguments are not only to policy makers but to GCC citizens: “If we are ever to progress we need to review our work permit laws. If we can ever get away with saying the Kafala system is not slavery, we need to do away with labelling people as ‘Runaways’. The amount of money changing hands for the labour force is mind boggling and we don’t dare call it human trade? ”
When I was researching for my novel, The Dohmestics, scheduled for release in paperback this June, I heard all sides of the employer/employee conundrum. Those of housemaids who appreciated their employers and were saving up to send two, three, four, or five children to university. Those of maids who were given a bed sheet to sleep on the kitchen floor instead of their own room. Those of maids who were deported after coming home intoxicated. Or pregnant. On and on. What remains clear is that while everyone might discuss the migrant workers, the men in blue jumpsuits building the stadiums for the 2022 World Cup, the housemaid or her day laborer equivalent, the cleaner, is ephemeral and perhaps even more vulnerable because she is in the most private space in the Arab world: the home.
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