MAKKAH: The abuse of foreign maids shows no signs of abating, especially with the emergence of another case involving two Indian maids.

Jamila and Zarina (not their real names) came to the Kingdom from the southern Indian city of Hyderabad to work as maids some months ago.

“After we came, we discovered that our sponsor had made a deal with a recruitment agency and we were made to work in different houses for different families, something we were not told in India,” said Zarina.

One of the families Zarina was sent to work for kept pushing her into their swimming pool, beat her and locked her up in a room for eight days when she refused to work and said she wanted to return to India.

“I begged the sponsor to let me go back to India, but he said that I should either pay him SR15,000 or I could go and die,” she told Arab News in tears.

“The sponsor is asking for SR15,000 from me and SR10,000 from Jamila to send us back to India. We are very poor; where can we get so much money from?” she said. “We worked as slaves for months but nobody paid us a single riyal. The money we earned was given to the agency,” she said.

“And we aren’t the only women, there were other women in the agency. I don’t know what happened to them,” she added.

Jamila came to the Kingdom to earn money to pay for an operation for her five-year-old sick daughter who has a hole in her heart. “I borrowed money to come here; even my mother is sick. For one month, the sponsor kept me locked up. It was Ramadan and for the entire month he gave me nothing to eat but two dates at iftar, and I used to drink water from a tap,” she said. “After that he turned me over to the agency where I met Zarina who had been living like me. My daughter is very sick and her condition is serious. I thought I would come here and work and do something for my daughter, but this is what happened. I put my head on my sponsor’s feet and begged him to let me go back to India to my sick daughter,” she said.

Both women are appealing to the Indian community and to the authorities to come forward and save them and help them return to India.