The following article was published in the local Arab Times on 23rd of this month. For the benefits of Goans in particular and goa.kranti readers in general I am reproducing it herebelow. Since there are innumerable maids working in Kuwait, this article will be very informative for our maids as well as to their families. I hope our Church leaders in Goa will highlight this subject in ther preachings in the Churches and religious places to educate our people of the ills maids are facing in Kuwait.
A. Veronica Fernandes,
Kuwait.
HOW TO KEEP MAID AT HOME.
By Rev. Andy Thompson.
St. Paul’s Anglican Church,
Ahmadi, Kuwait.
A recent visit to a jail reminded me of the scale of suffering for women in Kuwait. They come to serve families as domestic workers often at great personal expense and sacrifice to their families back at home. Every week the Arab Times continues to report maids who commit suicide, jump out of buildings from the upper floors in order to escape, fill hospital beds because of injuries from their employers and simply absconding through sheer exhaustion.
Running away does not help anyone. Often the maid by running away goes from frying pan into the fire. Gangs on the look out for runaway maids persuade and then force them into the sex trade. For the employers they suffer the inconvenience of having to find another maid and pay yet another 500KD in recruitment fees. Even worse they have the shame of having people wonder what they did to their maids to make them run away.
The reality that these women are human beings, wonderfully and fearfully made in the image of our creator God, seems to be forgotten. One employer on hearing how her maid had been brutally raped and forced into the sex trade after running away told me that the maid still owed her money and what I am going to do about that !!!
The role of a domestic worker in the Gulf has a long history. Traditionally the servants were very much part of the household and treated as extended family members and as such would stay with the family for years and years. Nowadays temporary contracts are more common and the expectations from the domestic workers is that they are employees and not family members. This has been a significant shift and in fact still ongoing. There is a clash of expectations from both employees and servants. Families long for their servants to belong as an extended member of the family.
There is a little known book in the Bible called Philemon which is solely addressed to the issue of runaway slave and his employer. St. Paul pleads with the employer to treat his runaway slave with compassion and ask him to recognize him as a man and a brother. In return the slave is encouraged to work hard and not give cause to his employer to be unhappy. This advice is very relevant today. “Servants obey your earthly masters with respect and fear, and with sincerity of heart. Serve wholeheartedly as though you were serving the Lord and not men because you know that the Lord will reward everyone for what good he does, whether he is slave or free. Masters, treat your servants in the same way. Do not threaten them, since you know that he who is both their Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him” (Ephesians 6.5.9).
In practical terms this means that maids who are paid regularly treated fairly and given time off will be more likely to stay and honour their obligations to the family and less likely to run away.
