As two European foreigners living in Beirut, we felt a call to show our support for the other foreigners living in Lebanon.
This country is full of foreign workers, and having a maid living in your house is fairly normal. This is great for the workers that get an opportunity to support their families by sending remittances home. They come from poor countries all over the world, like Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Sudan and the Philippines to do low payed jobs. They work long hours, and many of them don’t see their families for years.
But the problem is that the rights of these workers are not protected by Lebanese law. Some of their employers won’t even let them out on the streets, saying it’s too dangerous for them out there as they don’t have any legal protection.
That’s why this march was organized to illuminate this issue. Because there are many broken dreams among the domestic workers in Lebanon.
At the end of the march there was a little festival with food and dance performances from the represented countries.
Her is the video from Walk of Causes where we walked for the rights of domestic workers:
