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Abandoned and nowhere to go: A snapshot of migrant domestic workers stranded in Lebanon

War is a magnifier of the best and worst of human behavior, and it’s often those already vulnerable who suffer most.

Text and photos by HEIDI PETT
in Beirut, Lebanon

Heidi Pett is a freelance journalist. Her work in radio, print and television has been featured in publications like the Economist, the BBC and Sky News UK.

In an old Chevrolet factory building on the edge of Beirut’s southern suburbs, nearly 200 women from Sierra Leone lined up for lunch.

The night before, airstrikes had rattled the windows, echoing round the cavernous space. But now, in the daylight, laughter and chatter bounced off the walls. It was early October, it was hot inside, and as sweat beaded on their foreheads, the women walked slowly, scuffing their plastic slides on the concrete floor. 

They were some of the 176,000 migrant domestic workers in Lebanon — many of them separated from or abandoned by their employers who fled Israel’s aerial and ground assaults on the country. War is a magnifier of the best and worst of human behavior, and it’s often those already vulnerable who suffer most.

“The madam, she left me at the roadside,” said Patricia Sellu.

In late September, an Israeli airstrike had targeted the house next to where Patricia was a live-in domestic worker. She was sweeping outside, on the opposite side of the home, which shielded her from the blast’s direct impact. Still, she was enveloped by the sound, the falling debris and the choking black smoke. Both houses were on fire, and she didn’t have a chance to grab her phone, clothes or the wages she’d been hoping to send back home to pay for her children’s school.  

Out of confusion — or a lack of care — the family she was working for left without her. She had no way of contacting them. And as the village neighbors drove past without stopping or slowing, she had no idea how to get to safety, or which way to go. She wasn’t even sure exactly where she was. Having fled her previous workplace because the husband was sexually assaulting her — not that she had permission to leave — she’d only been with this family for a few weeks, and the agency that brought her to Lebanon hadn’t told her the name of the village.

All Patricia knew was that it was a long journey to Beirut in the army truck that eventually picked her up. They dropped her in Sabra, a Palestinian refugee camp in the capital, where she found other live-in domestic workers from Ethiopia, the Philippines and Sierra Leone.

These workers came to Lebanon under the kafala sponsorship system. Their residency and work rights are bound to a specific employer, and they aren’t covered by the country’s labor laws, which leaves them vulnerable to abuse and conditions that amount to slavery. Those who attempt to leave their designated sponsor are subject to detention and deportation, and it’s common for employers to withhold passports and wages.

“I just want to go to my country,” Patricia said. “The struggle is too much for us. Lebanon is not our country, we just came here to make our living, so when this happened, we didn’t have anywhere to go.”

The expansion of Israel’s bombing campaign and the ground invasion that followed caused more than a quarter of Lebanon’s population to flee their homes. Only Lebanese citizens were allowed in government shelters, which were already at capacity. So, Patricia and the other women she met in Sabra made their way to one of Beirut’s beaches where they slept in the open for four days before hearing about a makeshift shelter welcoming migrant workers.

In peacetime, the old factory building was an events space used for parties, exhibitions and photo shoots, and jewelry designer Déa Hage-Chahine used to hold parties there. Déa had started supporting migrant workers four years ago, when the impact of Lebanon’s financial crash, the Covid-19 pandemic and the 2020 port explosion meant many families could no longer afford to employ domestic workers and just dumped them. At that stage she was mostly just fundraising.

However, when the war caused a second, much larger wave of abandonments, also displacing migrant workers who had been living in shared apartments in Dahieh, which were subject to an intensive Israeli bombing campaign until the cease-fire, she took action. Déa sought permission to host the women in the empty building, and has since spent her days sourcing mattresses, food, clothes and medicine for the rapidly expanding number of women she became responsible for. 

Each time I visited, the volunteers would have transformed the shelter in some way, whether constructing furniture from discarded pallets, walling off a storage area, or bringing in cots for the five small children there. For the first few days, they fed the women with ready-meals delivered by one of the many volunteer groups supporting Lebanon’s displaced. But soon, they had a kitchen up and running, and assigned the women into groups responsible for cooking meals. It gave them back some agency and dignity — able to choose what they ate, cook familiar meals and pass the time. 

The volunteers — mostly young women from a loose group of friends — would take turns on shifts as well, doling out medicine, settling small arguments over phone chargers and food. They weren’t acting in any official capacity. They were simply young Lebanese who took on an enormous responsibility, working in solidarity with a community that had fallen through the cracks.

One day, signs appeared by the kitchen, trying to confirm reports about a young woman from Sierra Leona who was killed in an airstrike in the Beirut suburb of Dahieh. Her name hadn’t been recorded on any official lists. Over the next two days, the volunteers then registered all the women at the shelter and asked whether they’d like to return to Sierra Leone or stay in Lebanon and attempt to find new jobs and a more permanent place to stay. Most wanted to go home, but of the 200 women they interviewed, only one had possession of her passport.

Nena Ghajar was among the many who didn’t. Her employers had fled the country and took her papers. “I said ‘Madam, please give me my documents,’ and she said, ‘No, I paid a lot of money to bring you here, so I will not give you your passport unless you finish your contract.” Nena told me she was willing to finish the contract but wondered how she was supposed to do that given the family had left Lebanon, and she had no way of contacting them.

She had cooked, cleaned and looked after the family’s children and grandchildren for 18 months, saving the money to send back home to cover the school fees for her own four kids. “The madam didn’t look back, only the little children. The little one, the 2-year-old was crying, saying ‘Nena, yalla let’s go,’ and I had to tell her I couldn’t go with her because I don’t have a ticket and visa.”

When the family left for the airport, they locked the door behind them, leaving Nena homeless. She couldn’t go back even if she wanted to — the house was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike shortly after. But when we first spoke, Nena still wanted to stay in Lebanon and find another job; she hadn’t yet made enough to cover her children’s schooling.

Thankfully, while the Lebanese state struggled to support its own citizens during the most intense period of fighting between Israel and Hezbollah, immigration authorities agreed to waive fines and fees for women who wanted to leave but had lost their documents or changed employers. And while Déa and her team worked entirely on their own, they set up online fundraisers to cover costs of food, water deliveries, fuel, medicine and, eventually, flights home.

It was three weeks later that the shelter started receiving visits from groups like Médecins Sans Frontières, or got word that the International Office for Migration would cover the cost of a repatriation flight. On the day Déa announced this, the women broke out into riotous singing. Some cried as they belted out the chorus of “When Shall I See My Home?” a Nigerian folk song that had become an unofficial anthem of the shelter.

The women weren’t able to return with much, though — those on the first repatriation flight were allowed just a 10-kilogram bag. After years of hard work and hardship, many left Lebanon with less than what they arrived with.

In January, two months after the cease-fire was announced, only 30 women remained at the shelter. The volunteers now plan to close it after the final repatriation flights. However, they’ve found apartments and are covering rent for those who stayed but are still looking for work, as well as the cost of medical treatment and surgery for those too ill or injured to travel. 

Meanwhile, the women who made it home are relieved and elated. In the voice note she left me after landing in Sierra Leona, Nena’s voice cracked with tears: “I’m so glad. I’m so very, very happy now I’m back in my country.”