Meet The Women In Lebanon Helping Migrant Workers Stranded Amid The Bombing 

“I’ve never seen this before, the bombs. I was so scared. I was left on the beach by madam [her employer],” says Naomi. She is one of the hundreds of migrant workers from Sierra Leone who have been abandoned by their employers and left displaced due to the recent wave of Israeli bombardment in Lebanon.

Lebanon has over 176,000 migrant workers who work in exploitative circumstances which is supported by the Kafala system, an inherently abusive migration sponsorship system – that gives private citizens or companies total control over migrant workers’ employment and immigration status. It exists in many Middle Eastern countries, including Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates.

“At night, when they are bombing, we don’t have anywhere to go,” says Naomi. “We go to sleep on the beach. The next day... Madam Dea came to help and this is how we ended up at the Shelter.”

The Shelter is a grassroots organisation set up by Dea Hage-Chahine and Lea Ghorayb in Beirut. It’s a warehouse converted into a living space accommodating 200 destitute women from Sierra Leone.

I ask Ghorayb where it all began. “A friend of mine sent me a video on Facebook from a guy called Nasser. He documented women, migrants and women sleeping on the beach,” she recalls. “I saw the video and I directly sent him a message: ‘Where are they?’ I took some food and water, and I went to see them. They told me their stories of rape and violence; each story was more difficult to hear than the last. The second day I came back, there were even more women. This is when I called Dea. I knew that she worked with Kenyans [workers] when the Beirut port blast happened [in 2020]. So I thought she would be the best person to call to see what to do and how to help them.”

I meet Hage-Chahine at the Shelter in the storage division, sorting and moving supplies. She is quick and organised, simultaneously responding to many women’s requests.

“It’s an emergency situation,” she says. “You need to act on it immediately. That’s what I did.”

Organisations such as Ghorayb and Hage-Chahine’s – which are helping displaced migrant workers – have been excluded from state services, which are prioritised for Lebanese people.

Hage-Chahine explains the challenge, “It’s mission impossible to house migrants. I found the girls on the streets on September 28 [and] moved them to a government shelter in Tripoli. There were 60 [women] and three babies. The next morning, all organisations [both governmental and NGOs] were aware that I moved them. Yet no one showed up. I alone reached the location in the mountains in Tripoli. Then the government authorities tell me, ‘You have to evacuate. You have to take them out in half an hour because we need to use the space for Lebanese people – it’s not for migrants.’” 

In the space of just five weeks spanning September to November this year, the Shelter in Beirut has supported over 200 women. Ghorayb and Hage-Chahine, with the support of friends and private donors, created an organisation that provided food, blankets, internet and access to the consulate of Sierra Leone in Beirut.

I asked Ghorayb how they began to tackle the challenge of organising and catering to the women’s needs. She explains how she used an idea from her working life as the manager of the Grand Factory Nightclub in Beirut. “To organise things, we divided everyone into teams of colours with anightclub wristband, an idea from my club,” she says. “We needed to adopt a system to locate these women. If someone has a medical test, we don’t go one by one to search for them. It also is a way of building community.”

Sonia Martins from The Freedom Fund, an organisation seeking to end modern slavery, explains that the reason Lebanon falls short of international standards for the protection of migrant workers is that in the context of the Kafala system (which undermines the labour rights of these workers), domestic workers are especially vulnerable. “They work in the very private sphere of the employers. Some of them might be undocumented, which makes them more invisible and therefore more at risk in terms of displacement,” she says.

Back at the Shelter, I meet Fatamat – a former restaurant employee whose legs are covered in dog-bite marks, evidence of the violence she experienced at the hands of her former landlord, known as ‘Madam’. “I bless Lea and Dea,” she says. “These people saved me from my landlord. I went back to Madam to collect my things, I need my passport to return to Sierra Leone. When I got there, Madam refused, and she let go of the chain of her dog. Then I was attacked – no one helped, I was in agony.” Fatatmat is stoic, given the trauma she’s experienced. She touches my hand and says, “It’s OK, I will be fine. I just think of my two boys, with small, small steps, this pain will go.”

Fatamat required rabies shots, which Hage-Chahine explains was a significant challenge. “We had to pay $500 to her landlord to evacuate [her], then find the rabies shots, which are not easily found during the war. Three additional shots remain. That alone is over $2,000 on one incident. Medical issues are a daily challenge.”

The repatriation of 200 women back to Sierra Leone was also a fundamental concern for the Shelter founders. Many of the women hadn’t received consular assistance, and most importantly did not have access to their passports, as under the Kafala system, passports are held by the employer.

Hage-Chahine explains that these women are on the most difficult journey: some are mothers with children waiting for them in Sierra Leone, they have no access to employment, and the reason they came to work has now been upended due to conflict.

How did Hage-Chahine and Ghorayb even begin to coordinate the immigration process, given the challenge of passports and no support from government? “I’ve taken this challenge on. IOM [the UN’s International Organisation For Migration] is helping me by sponsoring the repatriation, but I’m the one doing the groundwork, gathering the data and information about each case, how to locate them, what’s missing in their files, how to prioritise the case works,” says Hage-Chahine.

Beirut has witnessed an increased number of attacks. The Israeli onslaught increased to the extent that the airport had also been attacked, reducing the number of flights into the country. Therefore, Hage-Chahine and Ghorayb had to locate a plane, which was achieved once again through their personal contacts, and agreed by the government of Sierra Leone.

Hage-Chahine shared that once the date of departure – 14 November – was announced for the women and their babies whose cases had been approved, the Shelter was rocked by excitement and the women jumped with joy. They sang in unison, “My home, My home”, which became their travel hymn.

Naomi shares: “[Dea and Lea] helped us especially because they gave us food, clothes, they gave us everything. Brought us back to life, saw us when no one wanted to.”

At the time of writing, 50 women remained at the Shelter, waiting for their cases to be approved. Hage-Chahine and Ghorayb are continuing to work with displaced migrant workers, and are raising money to help a new cohort of displaced workers – you can donate to the Shelter here 

Suddaf Chaudry is an investigative journalist, and producer currently based in Beirut. She covers conflict, politics and humanitarian issues for titles including Al Jazeera, Vice, CNN and more