Rescuing our values of compassion before it's too late

THE SAD story of domestic helper Blondie Colot Jumawan, a 29-year-old from Zamboanga del Sur who worked for a Saudi family in Dammam, made headlines in several newspapers around the world.

She arrived in 2003, eager, I'm sure, to work hard here and make enough money to support herself and her family back home. Unfortunately, we do not know exactly what happened during those two years, but we can easily attempt to reconstruct what happened.

Saudi Arabia with its strict Muslim culture, where women and men are not allowed to mix, at least in public, is the first shock that foreign workers encounter when they land here. Not only that, they also have to face a new and difficult language, Arabic, and also have to cope with over demanding and oftentimes aggressive employers, who expect them to be available for work 24/7.

In Blondie's case, her Saudi employer told Minister Mariano Dumia at the Philippine Embassy in Riyadh that she had become so silent in the last months of her employment that he was worried about her mental health. This is why, he claims, her contract was not renewed for another two years. Instead, she was paid her dues, given a ticket home and taken to King Fahd International Airport in Dammam on February 14. Instead of taking her flight home, Blondie handed out her money to strangers at the airport, which prompted the police to detain her. After the embassy was notified in Riyadh, she was taken into custody by Dumia and his staff until she could be sent home.

Blondie finally left the Kingdom for good on Monday, March 7, bound for Josefina in Zamboanga del Sur. In previous articles published in Arab News, Dumia had insisted that visible bruises on Blondie's body had been caused by her struggling with the police when they detained her, and not by her employer. That may be so, but this whole sad episode leaves many important questions unanswered.

For starters, why did Blondie's employer just dump her at the airport like an unwanted kitten? Wouldn't a caring employer, who was supposedly already worried about her mental state of mind, find it imperative to make sure that she boarded her flight to Manila; to tell airline personnel that she needed special assistance during the flight and when she landed in Manila to make her connecting flight? Wouldn't a caring employer make sure her family back home knew exactly when she was arriving so that they could be ready and waiting to receive her at the airport?

These are all measures that any compassionate person would think of doing, yet when it comes to us Saudis it seems that some of us missed out on compassion training when we were being brought up. Blondie is sadly not the first or the last maid to literally lose her marbles while working in this country. I have seen several demented Filipina maids arriving back in the Philippines on the Filipino Channel and was shocked at seeing the state of confusion they were in.

Is this what some of us Saudis have turned into? Monsters who torture their maids, both mentally and physically, and who sometimes even sexually assault them?

If only the worst Saudis among us could for just one month have their roles reversed with their maids and drivers from India, the Philippines and Sri Lanka. How would it feel then to be downtrodden, shouted at, abused and treated like dirt? I'm sure they would treat their servants much better after that!

Blacklisting abusive employers is not enough as we have clearly seen. It is far too easy for them to work around the bans, usually by hiring maids using the names of friends or relatives who are not blacklisted themselves.

Countries deploying domestic servants and drivers should be more stringent in screening recruiters and employers. They should also give their nationals better orientation about what life is like in Saudi, the potential dangers they might face from abusive employers, and what to do if they do fall victim to abuse.

The Saudi government for its part should set up a female inspection force, whose sole job would be to look after the welfare of housemaids. They would be a cross between being police officers and social workers. They would be given the power to make unannounced, surprise visits to the homes of any family that employs maids to make sure they were being treated right. They would be allowed to interview the maids in private, so that the abused maids would not be intimidated into testifying that everything was alright in front of their employers, for fear of retribution.

The government could also use the threat of public humiliation as a way of ensuring good behavior among employers. I'm sure if abusive employers, both male and female, knew that their photographs and names would be published in newspapers if they were caught abusing their employees, they would think twice before burning their maids with hot irons.

So many of us Saudis strut around acting as if we are the best people around, the most enlightened and morally upright, when in reality some of those who so loudly profess such attributes are themselves the worst abusers around.

It is a shame that the vast oil wealth that we have been blessed with has given some of us the wrong belief that we are untouchable and can abuse any servant without fear of retribution. The punishments that surely await those abusers in the afterlife should not be the only ones they get. The government should severely prosecute Saudi employers who abuse their employees. Jail sentences of just one year are not enough to deter other abusive employers. Enough is enough.

Instead of imprisoning innocent foreigners who are hardly a danger to our society, we should be imprisoning those Saudi rogues who are the real threat to everyone in our society.

Comments or questions? E-mail the author at rasheed@arabnews.com.