Far From Home

Migrant workers find solace amid hardship in Jordan

text

by Rosabel Crean with photographs by Raghida Skaff

RRhea Fernando was 22 years old when she left her home country to work 5,500 miles away. She was in the middle of a nursing degree when she decided to drop out to help her parents, who were struggling financially.

“Of course, you are innocent,” says Ms. Fernando, laughing nervously and recalling her first years in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan as a domestic worker. “You don’t know what is going on. I didn’t know what I would work as or what I would do.”

Ms. Fernando, now 40, is one of thousands of Filipinos who move to the Middle East every year in search of employment, signing up as housemaids, nannies, caregivers, shop assistants and cleaners. She found a job in Jordan through a recruitment agency in Manila that connects Filipinos to domestic work abroad.

“When I was on the plane, I was thinking, ‘Lord, hopefully the employer will not do something to me, like rape, something like this,’ ” she says. Her fears were not unfounded; human rights groups have documented rape among the various crimes and forms of abuse frequently suffered by migrant workers worldwide.

The recruitment agency placed Ms. Fernando with a Jordanian couple in Amman, the capital city. She adhered diligently to their requests to care for their two sons, cook, clean and, at times, give the wife and husband massages. It was more than a full-time job, she says. She worked seven days a week with only five hours of sleep each night; she was paid $150 a month.

Her working conditions were typical of Jordan’s “kafala system,” a structure of employment for foreign workers used in the Gulf nations,

Migrant workers in Jordan use video chat apps to stay in touch with their support network.