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LEBANON WAR

Abandoned and forgotten: Migrant workers struggle for survival amid war

Dozens of migrant workers from Sierra Leone were left to fend for themselves on the streets when their employers evacuated Lebanon without them.

Abandoned and forgotten: Migrant workers struggle for survival amid war

Female migrant workers at a shelter hosting them after spending days on the streets. Photo taken on Oct.4. (Credit: Olivia Le Poidevin)

BEIRUT – Three days. This is how long it took Aysatsu, a young Sierra Leonean migrant domestic worker to reach Beirut by foot, from a village in southern Lebanon whose name she didn’t know. When Israeli bombings intensified late September, after almost a year of cross-border fire with Hezbollah, Aysatsu’s employer took the family’s seven children and fled the country, leaving Aysatsu behind in their house, alone.

“She told me the work agency would come and get me,” Aysatsu said. But the agents never came. And when the bombardments got too close, it was her turn to flee.

Three days of walking led her to the streets of Beirut’s Ramlet al-Bayda neighborhood, where the Sierra Leone consulate is housed. On the sidewalks facing their home country’s consulate or on the beach nearby, Aysatsu and her compatriots spent their nights sleeping out in the open, curled up with what few belongings they had packed up in plastic bags.

Like Aysatsu, the families they worked for had also evacuated the country and left them behind, or dropped them off in front of the consulate claiming they could no longer take care of them.

Since the escalation of the war, the International Organization for Migration (IOM) estimates that 17,500 migrants have been displaced, including the 4,500 that the organization and its partners were able to locate. While unable to provide an exact percentage, Mathieu Luciano, IOM’s head of office in Lebanon, believes that the majority of those are female migrant domestic workers. Left behind by their employers or forced to flee, often the street is their only option along with thousands of others, in a country failing to provide the displaced, and especially displaced migrants, with adequate shelter.

‘These women are invisible, they have no voice’

On the weekend of Sept. 28, Lebanese human rights activist Dea Hage Chahine received around twenty phone calls, all from people telling her about the dozens of Sierra Leonean women who were sleeping on the streets of the capital. She had become a point of reference when she helped repatriate hundreds of Kenyan migrant workers in the aftermath of the Aug. 4 Beirut Port explosion.

Chahine teamed up with activists Lea Ghorayeb and Nasri Sayegh as part of a personal initiative, determined to find these women shelter. A task that proved difficult given the circumstances.

“When I got to Ramlet al-Bayda, I initially found 40 Sierra Leonean women, and three babies,” explained Chahine.

Among them was a woman named Mary, also from Sierra Leone, who had worked at a home in southern Lebanon. On Sept. 23, the Israeli army bombed more than 800 sites across the south and east of the country. Hundreds of thousands of people fled, and Mary wanted to flee as well, terrified by the ever-encroaching sounds of explosions, but her employer wouldn’t allow her. He was staying behind and said she didn’t have a choice.

Mary managed to sneak out and catch a bus from the village to Beirut where she first ended up in Sabra and then on the streets in Ramlet al-Bayda, where the three Lebanese activists found her and offered her shelter.

Photo to the left: A Sierra Leonean baby of a migrant worker at the shelter visited on Oct. 4. Photo to the right: Aysatsu sitting on her mattress at the shelter. (Credit: Olivia Le Poidevin).

The trio soon was made aware that a few kilometers away in Monot, another group of 20 Bangladeshis, including children had been staying in a parking lot belonging to Université Saint-Joseph (USJ). With more than 60 displaced under their wings, the trio eventually called the government’s hotline for emergency shelters, who pointed them to Ibn Khaldoun School For Girls, a governmental school that had been turned into a shelter in Tripoli.

However, after only one night of the women staying there, Chahine was informed the next morning that they had 30 minutes to evacuate the group — not under threat of an Israeli strike, as has become common in many areas of Lebanon, but because they were not the right demographic.

“The Minister of Education had issued a new rule,” Chahine said. “Schools can now only host Lebanese families. No Syrian, African or any other migrants allowed.” Contacted, caretaker Education Minister Abbas Halabi did not respond to immediate requests for clarifications.

“These women are invisible. They don’t have rights, they have no voice, and no eyes on them,” Chahine said. “They are not even recognized as displaced individuals when they actually are. Everything happens behind curtains, as if it was not happening at all.”

Left with no choice, she secured three buses to transport the women back to Beirut, who ended up sleeping in Martyr’s Square for another night, before they finally secured them a shelter inside a warehouse, whose location Chahine wishes to keep private for the safety of the women she’s taking care of.

At this point, the Bangladeshi women had gone a separate way, leaving the trio with the remaining Sierra Leonans and their babies, none of which had their passports on them. Employers often demand that domestic workers hand over their passports as part of their work contract, in a practice condemned by rights organizations as coercive blackmailing.

Photo to the left: One of the women at the shelter, talking to her fellow sister through a hole in the wall. Photo to the center: Woman waking past a space dedicated to hanging clothes. Photo to the right: Women's clothes on surfaces used to dry or spread them out. (Credit: Olivia Le Poidevin).

“When a crisis hits, migrant communities are abandoned the most, and consulates and embassies are suddenly unable to provide help, while international organizations are often not enough on the ground,” explained Chahine.

Already exploitative in nature, the war only amplified the adverse impact of the Kafala system, which gives private citizens or companies almost complete control over migrant workers’ immigration and employment status.

Fatima, a 27-year-old Sierra Leonean, was stuck on the streets of Beirut for four days before she moved to the shelter. She lived in Sabra, a neighborhood in southern Beirut, and worked for a cleaning company before Israel dropped a bomb on the building facing her, forcing her to flee towards Dora, a suburb north-east of the capital, where she spent two nights sleeping by the roundabout, and two more nights on the beach in Beirut. “There was nowhere to go,” said the young woman who was left to fend for herself.

Without access to a functional Lebanese number, and no internet, she couldn’t contact her consulate – which was already doing little to help its expats, according to Chahine.

Photo to the top: Woman combing her baby's hair, sitting on her mattress, and surrounded by her fellow shelter mates. Photo to the right: Picture of Fatima sitting down, after speaking to us about her time on the streets. (Credit: Olivia Le Poidevin).

Samir Bahsoun, office manager of the Sierra Leone honorary Consulate in Beirut, explained that the decision to evacuate migrants from Lebanon has to be requested by the embassy from the Sierra Leonean government directly. But the latter is stalling its evacuation orders. “As long as the airport remains functional, and safe areas can still be found in the country, evacuation is being delayed,” Bahsoun said.

With no funds at hand to provide shelters, there is little that can be done from their end, Bahsoun maintains, except to hand out registration forms for collecting data from Sierra Leonean migrants, in preparation for an eventual evacuation scenario, and seek support from organizations and private initiatives on the ground to provide temporary shelter, he said.

A temporary solution, as they await repatriation

Initially lacking running water and electricity, the trio progressively worked to turn the warehouse into a liveable space. With the help of grassroots initiatives, and international organizations, they’ve been able to secure mattresses, food and hygiene kits, all through in-kind donations so far.

Photo to the left: Mattresses, pillows across the shelter space. Photo to the right: Women resting, texting and laying down each on their designated mattresses and spots, inside the shelter that they now call home. (Credit: Olivia Le Poidevin).

Today, the shelter has grown to host 150 women and counting, and some aren’t just fleeing the war; they are also fleeing the abusive households they had been employed in.

Though they’ve been managing to get by, Chahine says they will soon need to launch donation campaigns, as they begin the costly process of repatriating these women.

Meanwhile, at the shelter, there’s nothing left to do but wait. Some have been volunteering in the kitchen to pass the time. “We want to go home,” said Fatima, her voice tight with emotion. 

BEIRUT – Three days. This is how long it took Aysatsu, a young Sierra Leonean migrant domestic worker to reach Beirut by foot, from a village in southern Lebanon whose name she didn’t know. When Israeli bombings intensified late September, after almost a year of cross-border fire with Hezbollah, Aysatsu’s employer took the family’s seven children and fled the country, leaving Aysatsu...