Elli Anita said she did not gain much during her employment as a housemaid in Malaysia and Hong Kong between 1997 and 2002 when she left her home village in Pringsewu, Lampung, in March 2003 for Bahrain where she was employed by an Arabian family with a monthly wage of 50 Bahrain dinars (US$150).
Elli worked for more than 16 hours a day for the nine-member big family for the first three months and escaped after facing sexual harassment from her employer’s elder sons.
With her status as an illegal immigrant, Elli one day encouraged herself to apply at coffee giant Starbucks at a one of its franchises, owned by a German national that hired her with a monthly 70 dinars pay. While working as an attendant at Starbucks, Elli faced a lawsuit filed by her former employer who paid $5,000 to a local supplying agency for her service. She then won the case after she told the Bahrain District Court about the exploitation she encountered during her employment with the big family.
“I enjoyed working at Starbucks with better payment for almost two years. By the end of my employment, I was given a plane ticket, pocket money and hotel accommodation for a week’s holiday in Jordan. Unfortunately, I no longer worked for the German employer because he went back to his home country,” she said, adding after the holiday, she went back home.
Elli admitted she could not save during her two-year employment because she used her monthly wage to cover basic needs.
The employment in Bahrain was her third experience working overseas. Previously she worked in Hong Kong and Malaysia where she learned more about different employment and treatment in the two countries.
Her overseas employment began in 1997 when she worked for a family of Chinese descent, Chun Ling in Kuala Lumpur with a monthly pay of 500 Malaysian ringgits ($150). She was 18 years old at that time.
Working almost 10 hours a day, Elli was employed for two years and two months. “Yet, I could not save because a part of my wage was withheld by her female employer for unspecified reasons.”
In late 1999, she returned home and after staying for several months, Elli departed to Hong Kong and took a similar job with a family who owned a saloon business, with a labor contract spelling out her working hours, weekly day-off and HK$3.670 (US 40 cents) monthly salary.
She was employed at the saloon business for more than one year and she did not know that the job was contrary with her employment application with the local labor authorities.
“After information sharing with a Filipino worker six months later, my employer and I were involved in a major dispute over her violating employment rights and with the help of Christian Action for Domestic Workers, I took the recorded dispute to local labor authorities for settlement,” she said.
Elli went back home in 2002 to meet her family in Lampung.
She said she had no skills to work in her family’s farming land and she preferred to work overseas and travel many countries. She went to Dubai through illegal procedure in 2009. After waiting for employment, she stayed and worked at a foreign labor agency that later smuggled her to war-torn Iraq.
“I was aware of my presence in Iraq from the Iraqi money used by my new employer to pay my sponsor. My employer introduced himself as Shamal Abdulla and has a big residence with many bodyguards in Selemania town.
Two months later she was hospitalized and underwent surgery for breast cancer at her cost and her employer’s. “During my stay at the district hospital, I had a chance to make calls to the embassy and the Foreign Ministry to let them know that I was trapped in Kurdistan.
“I spoke many times with the director general for citizen protection at the Foreign Ministry but he said he could not help me and asked me to escape. But I could not go anywhere amid the war,” she said.
She also filed a protest to her foreign agency in Dubai who supplied her to the war-torn country but he said he could not help her and she was asked to abide by the labor contract she signed with another foreign agency in Kurdistan.
The agency took her back to her employer but later Elli escaped and was housed in a dormitory belonging to a labor agency where she met with many troubled workers from Indonesia and the Philippines. She took her Indonesian fellow workers to the local office of the International Organization for Migration (IOM) to seek help. “In coordination with a Jordanian activist, the IOM smuggled us out of Iraq and flew to Jakarta via Jordan on November 2009.”
In the past two years, Elli has joined Migrant Care to help handle returning troubled workers. “I decide to join Migrant Care with monthly pay, which is adequate to cover my daily needs,” she said.
