In most countries, working as a housekeeper or nanny is a relatively safe occupation.
However, when we travelled through Kenya and Uganda from busy city neighbourhoods to far-reaching agricultural villages, we heard many variations in the same horror story.
At least 274 Kenyans, almost all of them, have died in Saudi Arabia in the past five years. At least 55 people died last year. It's twice as many as the previous year.
The autopsy only raised more questions. The body of a Ugandan woman showed extensive bruising and signs of electric shock, but her death was named “Natural.” An astonishing number of women were found who fell through the roof, balcony, or, in some cases, the air conditioner opening.
How about this? This was not an obscure industry with nighttime players. East African women were recruited into thousands, trained by established companies, and then sent to Saudi Arabia through processes regulated and approved by the governments of Uganda, Kenya and Saudi Arabia.
Workers' advocates have long denounced the old-fashioned Saudi labor laws. But we thought there was something else playing around with us. We spent nearly a year trying to figure it out.
Workers are often sold in dreams that become nightmares.
We interviewed over 90 workers and their families and carefully analyzed employment contracts whenever possible.
It turns out that women in Kenya and Ugandan are being seduced by Saudi Arabia with promises of better wages and opportunities.
The recruitment agency and its brokers provide misleading information about wages and force workers to sign unreadable contracts.
Some institutions sell women as products. The agency's website provides workers “on sale” to Saudi Arabian clients. I saw something with an option to click.
When a woman arrives in the kingdom, the employer often confiscates her passport and belongings. A housekeeper in Kenya, Saudi Arabia, works for around $250 a month. But many women told us that their new bosses either shortened them or denied their wages and declared, “I bought you.”
Strong people make money from these women.
Using employment contracts, whenever they could be found, they began investigating businesses that benefited from these women, using autopsies, police reports or legal documents.
Corporate records and securities applications have led us to powerful people, including officials who could protect these workers.
High-ranking officials and their families in Kenya and Uganda have found that they own stakeholders of staffing agencies in their shares.
For example, Fabian Khuru Muri is a member of the Kenya Parliament and also owns an agency that sends women to Saudi Arabia. He is the vice-chairman of the Congressional Labor Committee, a job that can pass laws protecting workers. The committee denied that workers were hurt there, sometimes being champions to send more people to Saudi Arabia.
In Saudi Arabia, royal members, including descendants of King Faisal, were the leading investors in the institutions that supply domestic workers. Additionally, senior Saudi Arabian officials stand at the top of staffing agencies.
Despite growing evidence of abuse over the years, leaders, including Kenya's President William Root, have vowed to send more workers abroad. One of his top advisors owned a staff company. So does Sedrack Nzaire, which Ugandan media identifies as the brother of the country's longtime president, Yoweri Museveni.
Abused women are hardly reliant on.
In an interview, the woman shed tears and said her Saudi boss denied the food, raped them, attacked them with bleach and stabbed them.
However, the East African government has ignored calls from activists and human rights groups to negotiate a better labor agreement with Saudi Arabia. Employment treaties only include minimal worker protection measures.
The Saudi government says its law enforcement and courts will protect workers from abuse and help them seek reliance on them. But the woman said she had no access to such resources, and police sent it back to an abusive employer or government-funded facility that felt like a prison.
Many abused workers have to pay to return to their own homes, despite saying they don't need to. Our reports reveal that hopeless workers often return home, broken, disabled, and committed suicide.
And in the event of serious injury or death, families must navigate a web of deficits, indifference and immunity. In Uganda, Ishiko Moses Weiswa spoke to us about learning that his wife had passed away in Saudi Arabia.
Her employer gave him a choice: her body or her $2,800 wages.
“I told him if you send me the money, and you wouldn't send me, I want my wife's body,” Weiswa told us.
