BEIRUT: There is almost nothing Raquel Barrion doesn’t know about the two Lebanese children she has looked after since they were babies. But one day, the Filipina domestic worker decided to find out how much they knew about her.
Barrion, 39, was pleasantly surprised when — by means of a light-hearted quiz game — one of them got her birthday right and both knew her favourite colour as well as her best-loved food.
Many families across the Middle East and beyond might struggle to answer such questions about the live-in workers who cook for them, clean and care for their children.
The quiz game is one of many upbeat experiences recounted by Barrion on video sharing app TikTok as a way to tell the rarely heard stories of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon. By posting daily videos, which have garnered more than 600,000 likes in a year, Barrion said she hoped to give a voice to Lebanon’s often-neglected domestic workers and a humanising glimpse into their hidden lives.
“It’s a simple message, we’re domestic workers and work at home, but we’re also human. We need our freedom’’, she said in a phone interview.
Several hundred thousand migrant domestic workers from countries including the Philippines, Ethiopian, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh live in Lebanon, where the coronavirus pandemic has compounded financial woes.
As the crisis intensified last year, scores of employers dumped live-in domestic workers on the streets, saying they could no longer afford monthly wages often as low as $200. Reports of inhumane treatment and horrific abuse under the country’s kafala employment system, likened by rights groups to modern-day slavery, spread across the world.
Barrion, however, said her 11 happy years in Lebanon showed domestic work could benefit both the worker and their employees, and bring positives for the host country too.
She gets paid what she considers a fair wage, $700, gets regular time off, and said her employers treat her “like family”.
It was the start of Lebanon’s first lockdown last March when Barrion started posting videos to TikTok because she was forced to spend her days off at home.
— Thomson Reuters Foundation
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