A Kenyan woman has narrated the suffering she went through during her short-lived stay in Saudi Arabia, where she worked as a house help.
Lydia Mutua was hooked up with a Saudia employer by a Nairobi-based recruitment agency after paying up Sh60,000 as processing fee and an additional medical fee of Sh5,000. Although she admits she was aware of previous reports of Kenyan domestic workers being tortured in Saudi Arabia by their employers, she says she was desperate to earn good money.
“I had heard that people could make good money working for rich families in Saudia, so I wanted to have that connection as well.”
“I could not imagine that I could be pocketing a cool Sh80,000 per month. Even if I managed to work for six months, the money could be enough for me to start a business,” revealed Lydia.
Life in Saudi Arabia turned out to be the complete opposite of what she had expected as she was forced to work for at least 18 hours in a day and sleeping for only two hours. Further to this, her employer gave her little and sometimes no food as well as physically beating her and slashing her salary over small mistakes.
“Woe unto you if you make an error while performing these duties because you will be subjected to physical abuse or your salary deducted.”
After two months of working as a house girl, where she did all house chores and even gardening, she threw in the towel and decided to return home. “After working for two months for a middle-class business family in Sakaka, which is about 1,200 kilometers from the capital Riyadh, I decided that there was no way I could stay there and watch myself die,” she told Ureport.
“I decided to request for help from my parents back in Kenya who sent me money for transport after which I jetted back.”
Lydia, who currently lives in Mlolongo, says she can never return to Saudi Arabia to work as a house help and can only accept a job offer from a well-established company.
“Unless I am going for a company job, there is no way I will go back there with what I experienced,” she noted.
