WOMEN, NOT SRI LANKA, BEAR TH RISK IN MIDEEAST MAID BUSINESS

May 11, 2005 - (Gulf times) Sri Lanka: The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class of wide-eyed women before her how to clean it properly.

If the machine smells, “Mama,” as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their female employers, “will be angry and she will hammer and beat you.”

“This is where you go wrong,” the teacher continued. “That is how Mama beats you and burns you - when you do anything wrong.”

Eighteen female hands took down every word, as if inscription could ward off ill fortune. Among the women, Rangalle Lalitha Irangame was struggling to keep up, haggard after a sleepless night in the hospital. Her 4-year-old daughter was sick with a fever, a worrisome turn for any mother, but a cause for panic for one about to leave for years abroad.

After a year of thinking, 35-year-old Lalitha - as she prefers to be called - decided to trade her life as a Sri Lankan homemaker for one as a Middle Eastern housemaid. After completing their 12-day training, she and her classmates would join a mass migration of women to the Arabian Gulf, trading the fecundity and community of Sri Lankan villages for the aridity and high-walled homes of the Arab world.

Behind those walls the women risk exploitation so extreme that it sometimes approaches “slaverylike” conditions, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report on foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. But while attention has focused on the failure of some countries to prevent or prosecute abuses, the de facto complicity of the countries that send their women abroad has largely escaped scrutiny.

For developing countries, migration has become a safety valve, easing the pressure to employ the poor and generating more than $100bn in remittances in 2003, according to a study by Devesh Kapur, an associate professor of government at Harvard.

More than a million Sri Lankans - roughly one in every 19 citizens - work abroad, and nearly 600,000 work as housemaids, according to government estimates. Migrant workers have become Sri Lanka’s largest and most consistent earners of foreign exchange.

In Saudi Arabia, the most common destination, they call Sri Lanka “the country of housemaids.”

Sri Lanka’s government has become an assiduous marketer of its own people. With training programmes like the one in which Lalitha is enrolled, it is helping to prepare what is by now a second generation of housemaids. It even provides a safe haven to shelter, hide and rehabilitate those women who return with broken bodies, damaged minds or incipient children.

But it does little to publicize those abuses, protest against them or protect the women for fear of jeopardizing the hundreds of millions of dollars they send home each year.

The women’s remittances have built homes, provided capital for businesses, and given the women themselves an enduring confidence. But those gains have come with incalculable hardships.

The women often leave indebted, work virtually indentured and have almost no legal redress against the sexual harassment, confinement or physical abuse they often suffer in the countries they adopt.

With no absentee voting rights, they also have no political voice back home.

By one estimate, 15% to 20% of the 100,000 Sri Lankan women who leave each year for the Gulf return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary, or get drawn into illicit human-trafficking schemes or prostitution.

Many housemaids who run away from their employers are kept in limbo at Sri Lanka’s embassies because no one wants to pay their way home. Last year, after their plight was publicised, the government airlifted home 529 maids who had been living for months, packed as tightly as in a slavehold, in the basement of the embassy in Kuwait.

Hundreds of housemaids have become pregnant, often as a result of rape, producing children who, until Sri Lanka’s Constitution was recently amended, were stateless because their fathers were foreigners.

The bodies of more than 100 women are sent home each year, with most deaths labeled “natural” by the host governments, although Sri Lankan officials concede they are powerless to investigate.

Back home, the exodus has reconfigured family life. Women dispense maternal love through letters, cash and cassettes sent home. Divorce and poor school attendance have become routine byproducts of the women’s absence.

But there are less tangible tolls as well. Roshan Prageeth Kumarasinghe, an 18-year-old neighbor of Lalitha’s whose mother worked abroad for a decade, held back tears as he reflected on her absence.

“That time will never come back,” he said.

In Lalitha’s class, nine of the women were mothers, all 40 and younger, all prepared to give up everything for their children’s future, including, for two, four or 10 years, the company of the children themselves.

By the end of their 12-day course, they would learn how to dismantle a vacuum cleaner and say “toilet cleaner” in Arabic. They would learn, too, not to take the gold chain their employers would leave out as temptation.

The course was conducted by the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, a public corporation established by an act of Parliament in 1985 to both promote migration and protect migrants, two sometimes contradictory missions. It runs 22 training centers, including the one in Kegalla.

Many of the women at the center had been recruited by a network of private agents, not always reputable, who strolled rural villages and town bus stands looking for new prospects. The agents earned commissions for each woman from both the foreign employment bureau and partner agents in the Middle East.

Lalitha’s course aimed to create competent maids, but also docile ones, who would serve out two-year contracts promising about $120 a month even if the pay almost never came. A maid’s greatest asset, teachers taught, was “tolerance.”

The reason for that message, analysts and officials say, is the competition from other poor nations, notably the Philippines, which together send hundreds of thousands of women abroad each year. Too many demands for housemaids’ rights, the government fears, will simply prompt the gulf countries to seek housemaids elsewhere.

When it came to the prospect of abuse or sexual harassment, the teacher gave almost no allowance for the possibility that even good housemaids might be victimised, no acknowledgment that even a smelly cake mixer did not justify a beating.

Karunasena Hettiarachchi, the chairman until recently of the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment, said the government did what it could to protect women working in other countries, but the very nature of the job made it difficult.

In a house, as opposed to a factory, “there are no rules,” he said. Sri Lanka’s embassies had no power to investigate what went on behind private walls.

From: http://www.gulftimes.com/site/topics/article.asp?cu_no=2&item_no=36190&version=1&template_id=44&parent_id=24