JEDDAH, 4 April — Indira Kumari was 21 when she arrived in Saudi Arabia from Colombo in November 2001, after being recruited as a housemaid. Within four months, she discovered that living with the family of her local sponsor was so hellish that she had only one option: to escape their clutches by fleeing to the Sri Lankan consulate.

Musahina, another maid, was just 13 when she was sent by an agent in Colombo to work with a family in Madinah. She has not received a salary during her 18 years of service.

She, too, has taken refuge at the Sri Lankan Consulate here.

Indira and Musahina are part of a group of 45 runaway Sri Lankan maids who have fled to the consulate, and who were interviewed by Arab News over the course of last week. They are there, they say, for their own protection, and to seek the help of consulate officials in either sorting out their sponsors or, if all such efforts fail, facilitating their safe passage home. In the past, about 50 percent have ended up going in each direction.

More than 19,000 cases of maids fleeing their sponsor were reported last year — particularly Indonesians, Filipinos and Sri Lankans, according to the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs.

Awadh Al-Radadi, undersecretary at the ministry, attributed the increasing tendency mainly to the sponsor’s failure to pay on time. In many other cases, however, maids take flight to escape physical, sexual or verbal ill-treatment by members of their sponsor’s family living in the same house; after being influenced by male compatriots, who tempt them with stories of a better life on the run; or because they are simply unable to continue working out of combination of physical exhaustion and homesickness.

A sudden change in diet and culture, added to the communication barriers, also results in hardship and loneliness.

Although all of these problems are being addressed at the government and NGO levels in Colombo and elsewhere, the agents there continue to play havoc with the lives of candidates, who are easily fleeced by them.

The ministry which handles these cases provides food and lodging until they are settled, when the maids either return to their former employers or are deported to their home countries. However, many — as with those visited by Arab News this week at the Sri Lankan consulate — make directly for their home country’s mission, where they go through the same process on a semi-official basis.

At the Sri Lankan Embassy, Indira told me that she has a school diploma and that she could have been gainfully employed in her own country. “But I was seduced by stories about how the Kingdom is the place where you can get a tax-free salary two, three or even four times as much as what you can get back in Sri Lanka,” she said.

She was sitting on the terrace where she shares a series of rooms with the dozens of other runaways.

“My elder sister was a maid with a Riyadh family, and she encouraged me to come here. She told me that she was happy with her Saudi sponsor because they treated her with respect,” Indira added.

However, that was not to be her fate. Even before she left home, she was cheated by her Sri Lankan agent, who charged her SR800 for alleged expenses incurred in helping to secure her the job.

“It’s only when I got here that I found out how it’s the agent in Colombo who is supposed to bear all the expenses, because he takes a huge commission from the sponsor in the Kingdom itself,” she recalled.

“I haven’t been paid a salary since I started working for the Saudi couple who hired me. And I was humiliated and harassed from the beginning by the husband, who was at home during the daytime because he did the night shift at work,” she said.

I asked her to elaborate. She looked at the ground and blushed, and then whispered that she would prefer not to.

Her friend Musahina, meanwhile, says that she is getting over the disappointment of learning that the Labor Court has ruled that documents bearing her thumb print are evidence that she has been paid for all the 18 years that she has worked for her sponsor.

She says: “All I’ve received during those 18 years is SR7,000. Recently, the sponsor paid me SR2,500 and took my thumb print on a bit of paper that had Arabic writing on it. Afterward, I was told that the thumb print meant that I had acknowledged receipt of everything that was due to me. The Labor Court, after a few hearings, asked me whether the thumb print was mine. When I confirmed that it was, the court said that I don’t have an argument.”

Speaking about this case, the Sri Lankan Consul General A.C.M. Ibrahim told Arab News that he intends to appeal to a higher authority on her behalf.

There have been a string of sensational stories in the newspapers over the last year about Saudis accused of mistreating their maids.

Last August, a Shariah court sentenced a Saudi woman to one year in jail and 200 lashes for torturing her Indonesian maid, who later strangled herself using electric wire. A forensic report showed that the maid had injuries to the head, chest, neck, face, back, arms, legs and abdominal area, indicating that she had been systematically beaten. The maid was found dead at her employer’s house in Tabuk, 1,300 kilometers northwest of the Saudi capital, with a wire around her neck which had been tied to the door.

The forensic report indicated that the maid committed suicide, but the judge was convinced she had been driven to it because of maltreatment by the housewife.

Witnesses told the court they saw serious injuries on the maid’s body and that she had told them they had been caused by the housewife, who sometimes used a hot iron to punish her. The housewife admitted that she had prevented the Indonesian maid from leaving the house, and also told the judge that her husband had not been paying her salary regularly.

The case of a Saudi national who was refused entry to the Philippines also made the headlines last August. The Saudi demanded financial compensation, in addition to an official apology. However, the embassy justified its action by saying that the Saudi mistreated his Filipino maid. Philippine Ambassador Rafael Seguis was extremely public and passionate in his defense of the maid, whom he said had been sexually assaulted.

Local authorities have recently introduced a new system to deal with the runaway maids. It is now obligatory on the part of the consulates to refer each runaway maid and her complaint to the local police. The police in turn refer the matter to the “Lajina,” a legal body that functions at the Tarhil (Deportation Center). The Lajina first tries to bring about a compromise between the complaining maid and her sponsor, failing which it helps the maid in referring the matter to the Labor Court with the help of the consulate.

This is an improvement. But what is really needed, if things are going to be stopped from getting to that stage, is for a change in attitude among those employers who would otherwise mistreat their home helps, so that they recognize them for what they are: vulnerable human beings who are a long way from home, and who deserve security and respect.