Saudis Turn to Ethiopian Maids After Asian Backlash

By William Davison & Simon Clark - Jan 24, 2013 Zeini Kadir escaped at dawn, when the gates of the house in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, were open for morning prayers. Barefoot, she ended up at an agency catering to Ethiopian workers like her. After flying to Addis Ababa, she rode two buses and walked three hours to the mud-walled home where she grew up. She’d lasted just three months, cooking and cleaning seven days a week in the 18-room house where she said she was beaten with a stick. Still, she said she would have stayed in Saudi Arabia if she could have found another job. “It’s different from house to house,” Zeini, 19, said, smiling. “Not all employers are bad.” Anyway, “what jobs are there here?” So few that her father, Kadir Biftu, borrowed 6,000 birr ($327) to send her in August to the Persian Gulf port city, where she could earn enough to pay the debt in months -- something he couldn’t do in a year as a farmer. “We’ll be very happy if she goes back to Saudi Arabia,” said Zelika Kusay, Zeini’s mother, after a snack of maize browned over a fire. Saudi Arabia, the world’s biggest oil exporter, has imported female servants for decades. The Indonesian government stemmed the flow after the beheading of an Indonesian maid convicted of killing her employer in June 2011. Maids from the Philippines had also stopped arriving, after Filipino lawmakers wrote a report on alleged abuses, including rapes and beatings. So the Saudis turned to Ethiopia, across the Red Sea, where most people live on less than $2 a day. “Saudi Arabia will choose the most compliant country,” said Walden Bello, chairman of the Overseas Workers Affairs Committee in the Philippine House of Representatives. Read the entire article here