From Challenge # 61
Housemaids in Gaza: The Story of Mela Afandie Fuad Abu Libdeh with Michal Schwartz and Roni Ben Efrat In the pre-dawn hours of March 25, a group on its way to a mosque in Gaza found an Indonesian woman named Mela Afandie lying on the ground in her blood unable to move. Several hours earlier she had jumped, holding her handbag, from the fourth story of the house where she had worked for two days as a maid and nanny. The prayer group called the police, who took Ms. Afandie to Shifa Hospital in Gaza and phoned her employer. Because she understands only Indonesian, she could not communicate with anyone except by signs. According to her papers, she is 27. The physician at Shifa, Dr. Issam Abu Ajwa, estimated her age at 15. (Six weeks later she confirmed that she was born on June 25, 1985.) She is 1.5 meters in height (ca. 5 feet) and weighs 40 kg. - about 80 pounds. The doctor was able to determine that she had not been sexually abused. One leg was broken, the other paralyzed. Her liver, torn and bleeding, required an immediate operation - but who would authorize this? Three hours passed in haggling between "Morning Star", the labor company that had brought her in, and the family that had employed her. (The company finally gave the authorization.) Two weeks of sign language followed. The family did not visit. Nor did anyone from the labor company. No one in the hospital had a clue as to why Mela Afandie had jumped. She lay weeping and clutching her Koran. We shall return to her. We shall not find out with certainty why she jumped, although suicide, we shall see, was probably not the motive. What we do know about Mela Afandie differs little from what we know in general about foreign workers: They come from lands of great poverty. Their salaries are much higher than what they could expect to earn at home, though often much lower than salaries in the lands to which they come. The chief interest of the labor companies is not in their welfare, but rather in the maximization of profits. (The manager of Morning Star, for example, told us that the company pays the fare from Indonesia to Gaza. The family employing the worker pays Morning Star $2700 for a two-year contract, in addition to the monthly salary ($150), which goes to the worker. After the two-year period, the family is supposed to provide the worker with a ticket home.) In a foreign land, without passports (the company usually holds them - as Morning Star did Mela Afandie 's), virtually stateless, these workers have nothing to protect them from the company's aggressive pursuit of its interest. By the very logic of their situation, they are subject to merciless exploitation - the tiniest pawns on the huge chessboard of capitalist globalization. Nor can they find solidarity with the local working class whose jobs they are taking. Those who labor in construction or agriculture have at least themselves for company, although their living conditions are sub-Dickensian. Those who serve as maids or babysitters, like Mela Afandie, have better physical conditions, but they live in utter isolation - especially when, like her, they do not understand any local language. None of that is remarkable. The remarkable thing is the context within which Ms. Afandie's story occurs. For we are not in Israel here, which has brought in at least 300,000 foreign workers since imposing closure in March 1993, depriving the Palestinians of their jobs. Nor are we in another first-world country. Nor, for that matter, are we in Saudi Arabia, one of the Gulf princedoms or even Jordan. Rather, we are in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, where ten years ago an entire society was mobilized to throw off the Occupation, where people from all walks of life made common cause and looked toward a common destiny. Ten years ago a person was valued according to the sacrifices he had made or was prepared to make for the sake of freedom. People did not put on a show of wealth. There was not a single functioning cinema in the West Bank or Gaza, much less a casino or disco. The Palestinian people felt and expressed solidarity with the rest of the third world. In that climate of national struggle, nobody had a maid. Mela Afandie is one of hundreds whom labor companies have brought from Indonesia, Sri Lanka and the Philippines to serve in the palatial villas of the new Palestinian effendis. Millions of Palestinian refugees cannot come home, but the effendis bring in Filipinos. One and a half million refugees live inside the Territories - 600,000 in camps, in sight of the villas. Many are jobless because of the closure Israel imposes, but the effendis have Indonesians. A proud new aristocracy has sprung up in the West Bank and Gaza. Iyyad Mansour, who manages "Morning Star" at its headquarters in Jordan, traces the beginning of the phenomenon in the Territories to the post-Oslo immigration of wealthy Palestinians. Many brought their maids along with them. Others, who were not allowed in, sent maids to help aging parents. From these first sprouts the phenomenon spread to the nouveaux (or Oslo) riches. Mansour estimates the arrival of new maids to the Territories at a hundred per month, perhaps more - all this, of course, by Israeli permission. His particular company supplies between ten and fifteen, aged 25-35, and requires that its affiliates take health insurance for them. (According to our source in Gaza, Mansour's is the company that brought Mela Afandie in, but he denies it.) Philippine workers earn $200 per month, he says - more than the others, because they know English and have experience. At home they would earn $25 - $30. The Indonesians make $160 per month (compared to $20 at home) and the Sri Lankans, $100 (compared to $15). Their Palestinian employers are often extremely wealthy, but that's what these erstwhile freedom fighters and third-world activists pay. Mela Afandie lay incommunicado at Shifa for two weeks. Then Fuad Abu Libdeh, the contact-person in Gaza for al-Sabar, discovered her situation and told us. We started asking questions, contacting Morning Star and the hospital. We sent faxes to the Labor and Interior Ministries of the Palestinian Authority. (These have gone unanswered, and on the phone they continue to give us the run-around.) Under pressure, Morning Star agreed to pay the costs of hospitalization. We also persuaded the company to send an interpreter. On April 23, two days after starting a hunger strike, Mela Afandie was finally able to communicate. The interpreter was an Indonesian housemaid named Latifa. Her report of the conversation is strangely laconic: "Latifa says in the presence of Mr. Suheil Abu Sha'aban that the attempt to commit suicide was because of beating with a stick by Mr. Nihad al-Sheikh (her employer, whose response appears below - RBE) and Mela doesn't want to stay in Gaza but she wants to go back to her country Indonesia and therefore she's not eating and she'll continue not eating until she gets back." On May 2 Latifa visited again, and this time, in the presence of Challenge correspondent Fuad Abu Libdeh, Ms. Afandie gave a different account. She said that Nihad had behaved properly toward her. It was Iyyad al-Kurdi, she said, who beat her in Nihad's house. (Iyyad al-Kurdi manages Morning Star in Gaza. For his account, see below - RBE.) She confirmed the doctor's estimate that she is fifteen years old. She said that in jumping from the window, she had not been attempting suicide, but was merely trying to run away. When Latifa asked her why she had come to this country in the first place, she refused to answer. We do not know whether 15-year-old Mela Afandie made the long journey
from Indonesia of her own free will. (Perhaps she was kidnapped there?
Sold? Duped?) The Gazan branch of Morning Star brings about ten Indonesians
per month -"only Muslims," says Iyyad al-Kurdi, distinguishing his workers
from the less kosher Sri Lankans and Filipinos. Ms. Afandie arrived in
Gaza on March 3, but the company sent her at once to the West Bank town
of Jenin, where she worked for two weeks in one of the palatial villas.
It was too big for her to clean, Iyyad told us. She couldn't move the heavy
furniture. The company brought her back to the Gaza Strip, where she worked
five days for a family in Rafah. Then Attorney Nihad al-Sheikh Dib of Gaza
City hired her for his family - on a trial basis and without a contract.
Two days later she leaped from a window of his apartment.
The Account of Attorney Nihad
al-Sheikh Dib, aged 36 (parenthetical additions by RBE):
"I asked the (labor-company) office to send me a young woman who would look after the children. Madame and I have twins of two-and-a-half and a six-month-old baby girl. At the office they showed me the papers of a young woman born in 1973. I saw her picture, but the manager, Iyyad al-Kurdi, told me that she wouldn't be suitable. He said he had only just brought her back from Jenin because she'd made problems there. Then he posted her to someone in Rafah. Take her just temporarily, he said. I drove with Madame to Rafah and took her. I saw at once how small she was - clearly, she wouldn't do. I phoned Iyyad, and he said, "Another four days and I'll send you someone else." We brought her home on Wednesday, March 22. She doesn't speak Arabic, but we explained with signs that she would be responsible for the baby. "On Thursday afternoon at one o'clock, Madame phoned and said, 'Mela's fainted in the bathroom.' I told her to call an ambulance and I would go straight to the hospital. The ambulance took her to Shifa. Meanwhile, I called the labor-company office and told Iyyad, 'Mela's in the hospital.' We went to the hospital and saw she was all right. "Iyyad told me she puts on an act. ' If she does that again,' he said, 'hit her.' He also said he had hit her with a steel rod in Jenin. I answered that I wouldn't hit her because I feared that if I did so, she might do something to my children. "I removed her from the hospital and took her to a private physician, Dr. Jum'a al-Saka, in order that he should check her. I was afraid of leaving my children with someone who maybe had something wrong with her. He checked her over but said there was nothing wrong. He recommended that her blood and urine be tested, however, and gave me forms for the laboratory. We went home, and she slept in the room with the children from eight in the evening until the morning. On Friday at eight a.m. I found her by the door, saying she wanted to go to Indonesia. She couldn't get out, you see, because I keep the key with me when I go to sleep, to make sure my children won't open the door. I said I would take her to the office. "I then went to phone the labor company. When she heard me say the name 'Iyyad', she became hysterical, saying that she didn't want 'Baba Iyyad'. I said to him, 'She's a problem. Come and take her.' "He arrived at 11:00. The moment she saw him, she began playing with the baby as if everything was fine. I called her into the room, and Iyyad said to her, 'Sit down.' She sat on a chair, and he said, 'No. Sit on the floor.' Then he asked, 'What do you want?' She made signs as though she didn't want anything and everything was fine. It was clear she was scared of him. I told him, 'After you leave, she'll say she wants to go to Indonesia.' "After Iyyad left, she was all right. At five o'clock we went with the children for a walk on the beach and took her along. We were back home between eight and nine. At night we went to sleep. At five in the morning I woke to the ring of the phone. It was the police. They said she was in the hospital. I said, 'That can't be. She's asleep in the house here.' I went to the children's room and saw that she had made a sort of mound with the blankets to make it look as though someone was in the bed - like in Indian movies, you know? She must have jumped from the TV room." Here ends Nihad's account. Certain points support Ms. Afandie's second statement, the one of May 2, in which she said she was not trying to kill herself: He says she made a mound with the blankets, as if still in bed, and leaped with her handbag. She may have been making a desperate attempt to run away. She could not leave through the door, since Nihad had the key. Ms. Afandie's second statement supports Nihad's claim that it was not he who beat her. Yet she did say that Iyyad al-Kurdi had beaten her in Nihad's house - a point Nihad does not mention. The account of Iyyad al-Kurdi,
manager of the labor company in Gaza:
"Attorney Nihad al-Sheikh Dib is a very evil man. Imagine, he didn't visit her even once! That's really inhuman. After all, it was at his place that she fell. And it's simply not true that I said he should exchange her for someone else. I told him, 'She's too small for you.' But he insisted. The interpreter also said the Nihad beat her. (See Ms. Afandie's first statement, above. - RBE.) We are not in the least responsible for what happened, but out of humanitarian considerations, we shall cover the hospital costs and send her on Sunday, May 7, to Amman. From there we shall send her to Indonesia." Roni Ben Efrat asked Attorney Nihad al-Sheikh Dib if he at all regretted
having gotten involved with the import of foreign labor. On the contrary.
"Today we have another one from Indonesia," he said, "twenty-six years
old and Arabic-speaking. I pay her $150."
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