Two More Maids Abused

Nothing to see here folks, move along. Just some abused maids. Send 'em back to wherever they came from and get some more. Just two of many...

Interesting that we are not hearing much about abused maids lately. It has been quite a while since there was a report in the paper of a maid being abused. Make sure that nothing like that gets printed in one of our two English-language papers and that means that it just isn't happening any more, right? Something like that.

Or maybe not. "The abuse of foreign maids shows no signs of abating, especially with the emergence of another case involving two Indian maids." Both of them came to the Sandbox from Hyderabad and discovered after the fact that their "sponsor had made a deal with a recruitment agency" which was completely different than what they had been promised. Big surprise. One of the maids was repeatedly pushed into a swimming pool [could she swim?], beaten and locked in her "for eight days when she refused to work and said she wanted to return to India." Ahh. No. Silly woman. It doesn't work that way. You sign a contract and you work that contract out no matter what happens. She begged to be able to return to India but her sponsor wouldn't let her unless she paid him SR15,000 [$4,021.44]. That is an entire lifetime's earnings in India! If a woman - coming here to work as a maid - had that kind of money, she wouldn't need to come to the Sandbox in the first place.

One of the maids says, "We worked as slaves for months but nobody paid us a single riyal. The money we earned was given to the agency." I'd be willing to bet that the agency will say that it never got any money. You hit the nail on the head at the beginning of that statement: "We worked as slaves for months..." Did you not understand that that was exactly what was going to happen to you when you got here? Don't maids communicate back and forth and tell others what the situation is before they come here? Apparently not. She says, "And we aren't the only women, there were other women in the agency. I don't know what happened to them." You never will, either.

The other maid came "to earn money to pay for an operation for her five-year-old sick daughter who has a hole in her heart." She borrowed money to get here. [Something is terribly wrong with this system - that you have to PAY to come here...] "For one month, the sponsor kept me locked up. It was Ramadan and for the entire month he gave me nothing to eat but two dates... I used to drink water from a tap." [Water from a tap? Saltwater.] After her sponsor was finished abusing her for the month of Ramadan he turned her back over to the agency. No need to pay her for any of her work.

The article says, "Both women are appealing to the Indian community and to the authorities to come forward and save them and help them return to India." Let us know how that works out for you. Maids. Along with the rest of the imported laborers. Disposable help. Plenty more available where they came from.