Lebanon’s migrant workers stuck in limbo as thousands flee conflict

HAZMIEH, Lebanon: Migrant worker Fajima Kamara came to Lebanon three years ago from Sierra Leone, but when Israeli jets started pounding her neighbourhood with airstrikes last month, her employers left her jobless and homeless.

The 28-year-old mother-of-three had been working as a domestic helper for a Lebanese family in the eastern city of Baalbek, a Hezbollah stronghold.

As a nearly year-long cross-border conflict between Israel and the armed Shi’ite movement sharply escalated in late September, Kamara’s employers sought refuge in Dubai and told her she could not stay in their home while they were away.

Instead, they told her to go and find her “fellow African sisters” in the capital, Beirut, Kamara said.

With her phone and passport still confiscated by her employers and no time to pack, Kamara left Baalbek with nothing but the clothes she was wearing and made her way among the thousands of other displaced people to Beirut, where she hoped to find somewhere to stay. Turned away by local shelters that were taking in displaced Lebanese, she soon found herself homeless and living on the city streets.

“I slept on the street for two days. Now I have fever,” Kamara told media between sneezes. U.N. officials said on Friday most of Lebanon’s nearly 900 shelters were full, voicing concern for tens of thousands of mostly female, live-in domestic workers being “abandoned” by their employers.

Kamara eventually found refuge at a shelter hurriedly opened by Lebanese volunteers on Oct. 1, but is worried about her future as the conflict intensifies. For now, she hopes to stay on and find another job to avoid having to go home penniless. About 100 migrant workers and some of their children are staying at the same crowdfunded shelter, sleeping on thin cots on a cement floor and eating on wooden pallets.