Ethiopian maids 'dumped' on the Lebanese streets
Ethiopian mother Alemtsehay Nasir is back home with her family in Addis Ababa.
She went to Lebanon dreaming her maid's job would help make a better life for her 6-year-old young son, Christian. He was two the last time she saw him.
She was fired when the pandemic and financial crisis hit Lebanon and left on the curb outside the Ethiopian consulate in a suburb of Beirut.
One of the hundreds of women abandoned by employers without the means to get home. Lebanese labor laws also offer little protection for migrant workers.
"They just take them out and dump them on the streets with their belongings. I know women that have been raped and I know some who were bitten by snakes while on the street. The problems they face are enormous. Even right now, there are many women on the streets, waiting for someone to come to their rescue."
In late May, Alemtsehay was one of around 650 women who returned to Ethiopia on a flight organized by Ethiopian authorities and the United Nations' International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Maureen Achieng, IOM's chief of mission in Ethiopia, said women were still keen to migrate despite hearing horror stories.
"They still choose to undertake these perilous journeys in the hope they will succeed where others have failed. So yes the dangers are for the most part well known but clearly are not always a sufficient deterrent."
With little prospect of employment in Ethiopia, Nasir says she may not have a choice but to seek work abroad. But she will need to convince her mother Workitu Metaferiya, who wants her to stay.
"I became very depressed and fell sick because of worrying too much about her. I spent the last two years living in anxiety. There were times that communications would stop for a long time. We rarely talked to her. The time passed for the whole family with anxiety. Thank God now she is back home in one piece."
