it's been a long
hard journey for lucy
for a year she worked in lebanon a dream
that quickly turned into a nightmare of
[Music]
abuse
now safely back home in sierra leone
she's warning other women
not to go
85 of the people that live in my country
have their daily bread from their family
members that work
at god that is one of my dreams i want
to work abroad i want to work abroad
but i found out that there is a
difference of working in the middle east
and working in some of the other
countries
[Laughter]
domestic maids are largely at the mercy
of their employers and human rights
groups say lebanon's
economic collapse and covert 19 has made
a bad situation even worse
this scene is a snapshot of what's
happening
right across the middle east
last summer women were being dumped
outside their embassies
in beirut because families said they
couldn't afford the wages
the lebanese government wouldn't tell us
whether
anyone had been prosecuted for ditching
their worker
i'm heading to a safe house to meet a
group of domestic maids
in lebanon those that run away from
abuse
risk becoming illegal because their visa
is tied to the family they work for
and that's why they hide i wake up at 4
o'clock
in the morning then i finish work at 11
if i say today
for them to give me my salary they
locked me from the bathroom
why are you humiliating us are you
humiliating me
why did you run away from your employer
because my employer
treats me like a slave i said i can walk
without no salary
they told me there is no dollar no money
in libano
i want to go back home to my county for
me to go and take care of my son
did he abuse you he slapped me hits me
i just want to say that to the lebanese
people that let them stop to treat
us like this like beast like dog because
they value dog cats
more than us
all the women we spoke to have now been
repatriated
but many others are still waiting
a quarter of a million foreign domestic
maids
work in lebanon's cities and towns
cooking and cleaning
mostly unseen in homes across the
country
many in lebanon see nothing wrong with a
system
that provides cheap labor the situation
is not that bad at
all of course there is some lebanese
family is not good
at course everywhere there's people like
that i spoke to one domestic major who
said she wasn't even allowed to sleep in
a room
these cases very few
most of them the majority are happy with
their families and lebanon
but the lebanese government knows
there's a problem
last year they tried to introduce a new
contract
that would give domestic maids greater
protection
it's pretty extraordinary that you have
to write in law
that a domestic maid is allowed to take
phone calls from our own family
at the ministry of labour we think it's
the right
of any person to be free to receive
a call from his family but we are afraid
maybe
in some house they don't respect this
rights but in the end
the law never passed and back in sierra
leone
lucy continues her campaign warning
women
of the abuses some are listening
[Music]
now i am doing this job although i'm not
getting paid i'm not getting anything
at the end but like i'm getting what is
more than moon
trying to save lives
but poverty will always propel people
far
from home even to countries
where they have few rights
you