Maid Abuse

I try not to mention politics or political issues too much on this blog. There is a reason for this. The internet is full of endless chatter for, against, and about virtually anything you could think of. While my opposition to the war in Iraq and Bush’s campaign against civil liberties and due process at home are well known, there are many voices out there far more eloquent than mine that address those issues. There are, however, a dearth of sites that address ex-pat Americans adjusting to life in the middle east. I am filling a niche, so to speak. On the other hand, while political issues are not the core function of the blog, as certain issues cross our path, we are honor-bound to address them. Thus the case of Nur Miyati.

It’s odd that I should discover this article today of all days. My own housemaid dropped our baby today… the baby is fine, she hit a well-carpeted area from a distance of less than a meter. After being quite annoyed for a few minutes, she calmed back down to her happy normal self, with no signs or symptoms that would indicate that she is any worse for it. No big deal, right? What I found striking though, was my housemaid’s reaction. She thought I was going to beat her!

I asked her if any of her previous employers had ever beaten her, and she denied it, but it was very strange to me that she would conclude that a beating would be our response to this event. We have very good relations with her, she eats with us, we talk and laugh, we have never threatened her. Even today, I don’t think anything we said or did would indicate that we would punish or harm her. I am forced to conclude that she has heard enough stories from others to believe that a beating is a common punishment levied against maids by people in the Gulf.

After assuring her multiple times that we would never beat her, we decided to try an experiment. My wife started calling her Qatari friends, told them what had happened, and asked what they would do. Overwhelmingly, the response was along the lines of “Don’t worry, these things happen….. I dropped my baby once and ….. Don’t be hard on her, accidents happen….” and some asked how rigorously we had trained her in proper transfer of the baby (we had, the baby arched her back unexpectedly when being picked up).

So on the one hand our maid fears abuse, yet on the other our Qatari friends (all of whom have maids) were all very understanding, and none even remotely suggested punishment of any kind, let alone beating. There is quite a bit of distance between those two realities. I am guessing that maid abuse must be common enough that all maids know of it, and expect it sooner or later, but not so common that any particular employer will hear a first hand account of it through friends, or his maids.

Our own maid has had two previous employers, one in Saudi and one here. The Saudi employer was ok she says. They were very strict Muslims, so she never saw much of the man. It would be untoward for him to ever be alone with her, or to speak to her unless in the presence of his wife, so she never saw much of him. Other than that, and the fact that they had a lot of kids that she was not allowed to play with… she was to be strictly a maid, not a nanny, otherwise things were pretty normal.

The second employer transferred her to us, because they weren’t getting along. Our maid has limited Arabic skills, although she speaks great English, and she can’t cook much. The woman of the house spoke no English, had no children, and expected someone who could put on elaborate meals for guests. The language problem, while easily surmountable, just made things worse as misunderstandings arose. They decided that everyone would be happier if she went elsewhere.

Neither of these employers ever punished her. Norcaida (our maid) does say that she has heard of many cases of beatings and sexual abuse, but not first hand accounts. What I am wondering is just how prevalent is it? 10%, 1%, 0.001%? The rate of abuse makes a huge difference. Is it an epidemic, or are these just rare cases that are well publicized? (or oft repeated in the maid rumor mills).

It’s not something that could be easily kept a secret unless the family was very reclusive. Everybody knows everything about everybody else around here. It’s just how it is. Gossip is the national pastime. Yeah, I know, it’s un-Islamic and all of that, but it’s true. Qataris are very social people for the most part, and people talk. At social events (frequent), the men go one way, the women go another, and the maids another, they all talk, and no one talks more than the maids (they know everything!). At the end of the evening you can put together a pretty amazing composite of information.

If someone were to make a sexual advance on a maid for instance, I would expect that not only would the man’s wife find out, but so would her sisters and all of her friends, not to mention their maids, who would have found out first.

I am tempted to say that maid abuse is rare, but I also don’t want to minimize it. It is absolutely awful, especially considering the dependent relationship that maids have upon their sponsors. It’s deplorable. I know that the embassies here do help women who want to go home, as does the government. By law a maid can’t be kept here against her will, and every month, a dozen or so Indonesians show up at the embassy and ask to be repatriated. The embassy flies them home, I think they must have some kind of arrangement with the Qatari government on this. The Indonesian and Sri Lankan embassies are especially conscientious I am told, and the Philippino embassy less so.

I would expect that the article is probably accurate in bandying around numbers of 1% or so being repatriated. I haven’t heard of any cases of violence against maids, but I have read of a couple of cases in the local paper. I did hear of one case where a maid was brought in to a hospital comatose, (they had waited too long), and the sponsor was unconcerned. He said to the nurses “It’s no problem, I can have another maid here in two weeks.” As if they were concerned about HIM and his not having help at home! That was a rumor though. They say the maid recovered.

So who are these women, and why do they do this? My maid comes from the fourth, not third, world. Heck, maybe it’s the fifth! She is from a remote island near Mindanao, in the Philippines. To her, Manila is a big, rich city full of opportunity, and very expensive. So expensive that it is risky to try to make a living there. Her perspective of Manila is similar to say, a sharecropper in Mississippi looking at Chicago.

Norcaida’s family are subsistence farmers. They used to be sharecroppers, but thanks to a big family full of girls who work as maids, her father has bought his small piece of land. They live almost completely without cash, except for that generated by the daughters. The land produces a small amount of cash in the form of coffee and other “cash crops” (sometimes they pay off and sometimes they don’t), but most of what is grown is eaten by her extended family, or traded to neighbors for services. They catch plenty of fish. Norcaida knows how to make fish traps and says she is quite good at spearing them with bamboo spears. I believe her.

Her family has no electricity, and no running water. They cook over an open fire, either by boiling or grilling. They use no spices! I couldn’t believe that one but she swears it’s true. I am sending packets of seeds with her when she goes home, herbs and so forth. At certain times of year they may eat nothing but plain rice, at others, nothing but sweet potatoes. Her life to me sounds about par with that of a medieval peasant in Europe.

She is great with the kids, for the most part, but has limited experience with modern accoutrements, and little sense of the dangers that they may possess. Until she has a firsthand experience with something, it’s hard for her to extrapolate what might be dangerous. Some would call this a lack of common sense, but I think it’s really a lack of modern experience. I would be a real “babe in the woods” in her world too.

She tells the kids stories from home, and frequently I have to monitor them or have her retract them. In one case she was telling my son that there are flying naked vampires that come into your window at night and suck your blood. In another, she said that if a Muslim and a Christian marry, their children will be one half red, and one half white, split right down the middle (never mind that Philippino Christians and Muslims are of the same race, and neither is white or red!). Are these just stories from an active imagination? No, she truly believes them! No amount of skepticism on my part dissuades her.

She speaks a language I can’t pronounce as her native tongue, Tagalog (the Philippino national language) is her second language. She speaks and reads English and some Arabic, and has very little formal education. She is bright, but due to circumstances has few skills that would translate into money, aside from working as a maid. As a maid she can earn more in a couple of years than her family has earned in their entire lives.

Recruiters pass through areas like Norcaida’s, looking for prospects to work abroad, and many go. Labor is the Philppines’ largest export, and remittances are it’s largest source of foreign exchange. Educated Philippinos go to the US to work as nurses or programmers, and the uneducated go to work as common labor in the Gulf and elsewhere.

Most maids around here are not “new” to this work. Families prefer to hire women with experience, and the average maid that I know, if there is such a thing as “average”, is probably on her third two year contract. Women tend to do this for several years, with some staying for decades. Typically an unmarried woman may be a maid for a few years, then go home and get married, but she may return to being a maid later, either when her children are older, or even while they are still young, if necessary.

Tragedy leads a lot of women into being maids. A common story is that a woman’s husband dies, and she is left with young children and no means of support. She farms the kids out to a relative, then works abroad as a maid, supporting both them and their care-givers with her remittances. She may miss nearly all of their childhood in some cases, although she will go home at least once every two years for a month or two. I am told that it beats starving (direct quote from “Rose”, who has been working in Qatar for over a decade).

So what to do about women like Nur Miyati? I think that the best thing is exactly what is being done… publicize the cases of abuse highly and prosecute the perpetrators to the full extent of the law. Abusive employers can only exist in a climate of secrecy, if these cases are reported adequately, hopefully they will become very rare.