Backstory: Madame's 'Lady Driver'

Karina, like many Filipinas who migrate to the Qatar, faces degrading labor practices.

By Danna Harman | Correspondent of The Christian Science Monitor

from the February 5, 2007 edition

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DOHA, QATAR - The text messages Karina sends her mom back home all say the same thing: "all good! luv u!" Sometimes she adds more detail: "i am Gr8!" for example, or "miss u!" although the extra letters mean precious extra money, which she can't afford.

Karina only wants to keep up the cheerful facade, she explains, so her mom, far away on the other side of the globe, can be at peace.

But the truth, she winces, is not "Gr8" at all.

It wasn't supposed to be this way. Growing up in Manila, Karina and her mother survived on remittance money sent home by her father, a construction worker who spent 22 years in Abu Dhabi. When he visited every other year, there would be tales of riches and presents of jewelry boxes decorated with tinny gold. Karina grew up with the names of these far-away Arab lands slipping around her tongue. When she was old enough, she told her classmates, she'd follow her dad to the Persian Gulf and make money. Maybe she'd help send her cousin to college, or buy her grandmother a washing machine. The luxuries Karina wanted – a CD player, perfumes, and fancy shoes – all winked at her fromacross the sands.

Every year, tens of thousands of men and women from the Philippines head to the oil-rich gulf to find work. Increasingly, those migrants are women, who now make up approximately half of the estimated 200 million migrants worldwide, according to Human Rights Watch. The feminization of labor migration is particularly pronounced in the Philippines, Indonesia, and Sri Lanka, where women make up as much as 75 percent of legal migrants, many of whom are employed as domestics in the Middle East and Asia.

Qatar estimates that foreign migrants make up 52 percent of the nation's population and about 90 percent of its labor force. The majority of maids here are Filipinas.

Horror stories of abuse – unpaid wages, mistreatment, broken bones, sexual harassment, and rape – do exist. Last year, Human Rights Watch charged that Asian workers in nearby Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates faced systematic abuse, with some in conditions the organization said were close to slavery. But such stories aren't the norm here and are becoming rarer. Embassies are becoming more proactive (setting minimum-wage requirements for their nationals, for example), and local awareness of the problem is growing (Qatar is the first Gulf country to establish a shelter for abused maids).

What's more common are stories like Karina's, simple tales of people leaving poor countries for wealthier ones where work is plentiful. Most find what they come for, earning salaries up to four times those at home, supporting families far away, and saving up for some old-age comforts of their own. But this success comes, frequently, with a price: Years of miserable living conditions; hard work; humiliating treatment; and lonely, work-filled days and nights.

Karina arrived, at age 26, with a roll-on bag, stuffed – per her father's advice about loose clothing befitting Muslim lands – with her old baggy high school gym clothes. She brought a bar of soap, too, and the rosary her mother had squeezed into her hand on departure. She was proud of the carefully laminated documents she clasped: Certificates for 12 hours of on-the-job-training in elder-care, first aid, CPR, and hospitality services. And, of course, her driver's license. She hadn't come, she explains, as any simple maid, but rather as a "lady driver" – a job near the top of the domestic worker hierarchy. But it didn't take long for Karina to realize that none of her certificates impressed anyone.

"At the end of the day, we are all the same nobodies," she says now, two years later.

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