‘I Will Kill Myself’: The Enduring Nightmare of Lebanon’s Kafala System

In the moral void of Lebanon’s Kafala system, maids from Africa and Asia are trapped in a nightmare of inescapable cruelty

The orphaned 24-year-old woman had left Sierra Leone in July 2019 on a one-way ticket to Beirut. On arrival at the airport, she met the kafeel  the sponsor who organized the trip. Her passport was confiscated, and a contract was signed: $150 a month for 12 months for a total of $1,800. Though she would only receive $320. She was then confined in an isolation room, “the room where you wait for 12 hours, without food and water, for the Madam to come and pick you up,” she recalls. The hours felt endless. Hours “where you wonder why they took your documents, kept your mobile phone, and then you realize, only a few weeks later, that it is their way of controlling you. They got you, they can blackmail you, you are their merchandise.”

According to the International Labour Organization, an estimated 250,000 migrant domestic workers the majority of them from African and Asian countries are registered under the Kafala system in Lebanon. Girls like Mariema do not know that the Madam and the kafeel are part of this sponsorship system and that they are excluded from the Lebanese Labor Law and therefore have no rights or protections. The relationship with their employer will be unequal, abusive, violent. As the “holder” of the permit, the sponsor alone will determine their legal status, which may be revoked at will.