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  • mhm.

  • I thought you worded.

  • Thank you.

  • Thank you.

  • Bitch.

  • You You will get you.

  • It's been a long, hard journey for Lucy it For a year she worked in Lebanon, a dream that quickly turned into a nightmare of 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 up God, that is one of my dreams.

  • I want to work abroad.

  • I want to work up God.

  • But I found out that there is a difference of working in the Middle East and working in some of the other countries.

  • Domestic maids are largely at the mercy of their employers, and human rights groups say Lebanon's economic collapse and Covid, 19, has made a bad situation even worse.

  • This scene is a snapshot of what's happening right across the Middle East.

  • Yeah, 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 the height I wake up at four o'clock in the morning.

  • Then I finished work at 11.

  • If I said today for them to give me my cell again, they locked me from the bathroom.

  • Why are you more Latinos?

  • Are you?

  • You're letting me?

  • Why did you run away from your employer?

  • Because my employer treats me like you.

  • Slave.

  • I said I can walk without no salary.

  • They told me there is no dollar, no money in Lebanon.

  • I want to go back home to my country 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 beasts, like dogs.

  • Because they value Dawg cuts more than us.

  • All the women we spoke to have now been repatriated.

  • The many others are still waiting.

  • Mhm.

  • A quarter of a million foreign domestic maids work in Lebanon cities and towns cooking and cleaning mostly unseen in homes across the country.

  • Many in Lebanon see nothing wrong with the system that provides cheap labor.

  • The situation is not that bad at all.

  • Of course, there is some Lebanese family is not good at, Of course, everywhere these people like that.

  • Well, I spoke to one domestic, NATO said she wasn't even allowed to sleep in her room.

  • These cases, very few, most of them the majority are happy with their families in 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.

  • A domestic maids is allowed to take phone calls from her own family.

  • Ah, 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 their abuses.

  • Some are listening.

  • I make a triangle in the morning but I know you go again.

  • Yeah, the party.

  • Some money.

  • We don't have to explain.

  • You waited past there.

  • Now I am doing this job and I'm not getting paid.

  • I'm not getting anything at the end, but like I'm getting what is more than noon trying to save lives.

  • But poverty will always propel people far from home, even to countries where they have few rights.

mhm.

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