Maid in Amman

(Apologies to all my fans for the delay in updating–I’ve been so busy accumulating material that I’ve had no time to write any of it down. I’ll try to be more vigilant in posting regularly, but for this week, at least, you’re getting a week in review.)

Now, for those of you who like to think that indentured servitude is a relic of a less enlightened past, I have some bad news: here in Jordan, it is alive and well. Amman is host to large communities of domestic servants imported from poorer countries to the east–particularly, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and the Philippines. These workers, mostly young women, are brought here under the care of sponsors, who employ them, pay them at their discretion, and hold their passports to prevent them from fleeing the country. While some of these workers, like Hilda’s Indonesian housekeeper, are treated decently and paid a living wage, again, they are the exception, not the rule. For example, Rani, the young Indonesian woman who is employed by Jacqui’s landlady as her housekeeper and as caretaker of the building, has not been paid in three years. She is currently trying to get out of the country, but in order to do so, she must get a new passport.

Rani’s case is hardly the worst of them. Nonpayment of wages accompanies a host of other abuses, ranging from harassment to overwork to beatings to rape to murder. The situation is so bad that last January, after finding its embassy in Jordan virtually transformed into a battered women’s shelter, the Philippines placed a ban on all new domestic workers coming to Jordan.

Jacqui told me a story that appeared in the news recently about a domestic worker from the Philippines who, on her first day of work, went up to the roof of her sponsor’s building to call her family back home to let them know that she had arrived safely. Her sponsor didn’t like that, apparently, and upon seeing the girl on the roof, pushed her off the edge. The girl was paralyzed from the neck down and had to return to the Philippines where she died shortly thereafter. I’m not sure what happened to the sponsor, although I wouldn’t be surprised if the answer were “nothing.” A large part of the problem for these women is that they are legal non-beings, without rights, and generally treated with contempt by Jordanians. Because their sponsors hold their documentation and are essentially their guardians, it is nearly impossible for them to take legal action against their sponsors for any manner of abuse without the assistance of their home country. If they go to the police, they are simply ignored; the word of a foreign servant will always be trumped by that of her native sponsor. So they must instead seek help from their home countries’ embassies, a long process that could get them killed if their sponsors find out.

The second-class legal status of domestic workers also makes it difficult for them to seek justice in other situations.

Monday night, Jacqui and I were having dinner at Books@Cafe with Hilda, Shadi, and Lon (former chair of her department, now working at NYIT’s campus in Bahrain), when Jacqui’s phone rang. It was Dinusha, calling to say that she was in some kind of trouble and asking if she could stay at Jacqui’s apartment that night. We went home later to discover Dinusha, her sister, and her mother in the kitchen, looking panicked. Jacqui asked them what had happened.

Apparently, Sunday afternoon, Dinusha and her sister had been walking home from church when a Sri Lankan man (for our purposes here, let’s call him “Mr. Wonderful”) came up behind them and put his hand on Dinusha’s sister’s backside (in Jordan, touching a woman in such a manner is tantamount to rape, and this is made all the more serious by the fact that Dinusha’s sister is married). The girls turned around and hit him to make him go away. A scuffle ensued, and Mr. Wonderful and Dinusha’s sister both sustained minor injuries. Now, Mr. Wonderful–who had made advances towards Dinusha’s sister in the past–apparently has a girlfriend here in Amman, and has an illegitimate baby with her, so Dinusha and her sister went to this woman to tell her what her babydaddy had done and to ask her to keep him from doing such things in the future.

The next day, the police showed up at Dinusha’s house and informed her and her sister that Mr. Wonderful had filed a complaint against them for hitting him (valid) and for stealing his necklace (lie). They would have to come to the police station the next day (Tuesday) to answer for the complaint. Jacqui, as usual exuding Christian charity, sat them down and had them tell her their side of the story as completely as possible. She typed it out for them and agreed to accompany them to the police station the next day, to respond to the charges and to file a counter-complaint against Mr. Wonderful.

The next morning, Jacqui called up her friend Abdallah, a cab driver who formerly worked as a policeman (and who has several times asked Jacqui to marry him), and asked him to take us to the police station as well as to speak for the girls–being a former cop, he seemed a good person to have on our side. She also called her friend Karina, a Mount Holyoke alumna who works for the Institute for Diplomacy and can translate between English and Arabic. Karina agreed to come along, and said that the more expats show up, the better, so Jacqui asked me to come as well. Well, I wasn’t about to miss an opportunity to get an insight into the Jordanian justice system, so I was all too happy to oblige. Also, I can’t stress enough how badly our presence was needed–had Dinusha and her sister gone alone, there was every chance that nothing they said would be believed.

We arrived at one police station just before 10 AM, only to discover that we had come to the wrong station and had to go elsewhere. We went to the right police station, where we were told that nothing could be done until Dinusha’s sponsor and her sister’s sponsor showed up with the girls’ passports. Once they finally arrived, it transpired that Mr. Wonderful was willing to drop his complaint if the girls would give him 50 JD (and here we discover what this was all really about). Now, Mr. Wonderful is not too bright–in fact, there’s clearly something wrong with him, mentally speaking–and it didn’t occur to him that the trouble might well end up landing on him. After a while, once it was revealed what Mr. Wonderful had done, and that he had a past criminal record both here and in Sri Lanka, it became clear to everyone but him that the tables had turned (even after being put in a cage, he still wanted his 50 JD). Dinusha’s sponsor wanted to give him the money rather than having his name tied up in police records, but Karina (I think) convinced him that it was better to follow through with the girls’ complaint and see some kind of justice done.

We spent a good five hours at the police station, and ended up with two options: take the case to criminal court, in which case both Mr. Wonderful and the girls might end up in jail (all having verifiable assault charges against them–self-defense apparently doesn’t acquit you here the way it does in the states); or take the case to Family Protection Court and ask for a restraining order of sorts against Mr. Wonderful. Around this time, certain members of his family showed up and started antagonizing Dinusha and her sister, and Jacqui warned the girls not to rise to their insults.

Jacqui and I went in Abdallah’s taxi to the Family Protection Court to wait for Dinusha and her sister, who, along with Mr. Wonderful, were being escorted there by the police. They showed up and were taken in for medical examinations, and we waited. Finally, Jacqui said that since there was nothing for us to do, I should walk over to Cozmo (a hypermarket down the street) and buy a phone–something I’d been meaning to do. We explained to the guards what I was doing and they seemed to understand, so I went.

I bought a phone at Cozmo, but they only sold one type of SIM card, which was not the one I wanted. I walked back to the court building only to find that the guards had changed shifts and the new guy didn’t seem to buy my story. He told me to go around the corner and sit, so I went around the corner and sat in the shade of some olive trees growing by the side of an empty lot. Mr. Wonderful’s family was also sitting there, so I sat a little ways away from them and waited for Jacqui, who I presumed would come looking for me eventually. As it happened, she did, but she didn’t look around the corner, so she never saw me. So I sat there about an hour, with a phone I couldn’t use–granted, I could have just gone back to Cozmo and bought the SIM card, but I don’t know, I was stubborn–until a young boy (I think related to Mr. Wonderful) started throwing olives at me, at which point I decided it was time to leave. I walked to the main road, got a taxi, and went home.

Nothing was resolved that day, so Jacqui went with Dinusha and her sister back to court Wednesday; in the end, Mr. Wonderful went to jail, and the judge instructed his family to leave Dinusha and her sister alone. We don’t yet know how long he’s going to be in jail, but I think they’re going back Sunday to find that out.