Ethiopian domestics return home from Saudi Arabia. Mopaw Foundation/Flickr. (CC 2.0 by-nc-nd)
Sophie was looking tired when I met her in Kampala in January 2016. We’d last met the summer before in Turkey when she told me that her employer had refused to pay her wages. I offered to help her make an official complaint but she just shrugged and said, “Forget about it – nothing will come of it except for trouble”.
When we saw each other again, she told me of how she’d finally managed to get out and make it home. But what she told me also made me realise that her experience in Turkey had been only one stage of a much longer journey of exploitation that had taken her through Dubai and Saudi Arabia. Her depressingly similar experiences in three different countries over a period of five years says a lot about how gender and international migration regimes can conspire against migrant workers.
