Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan | Al-Watan
Like many other writers, I have previously written about the unfair treatment meted to housemaids in our society. The abuse begins with having their salaries delayed for no reason and ends with either verbal or physical abuse. I repeat what I have said previously: Such treatment is uncivilized. We are indirectly harming the image of our country both morally and politically.
This is especially the case when the media in some countries view the Kingdom negatively and make a big deal out of this issue.
I am shocked at some of the stories that I hear and read about in the press. Such stories prevent people from sleeping soundly; the details are so bad that one cannot ascertain whether they are fiction or fact.
One of the stories that I heard concerns a maid who was verbally and physically abused by her employer for several reasons. The family finally decided to terminate her contract and deport her. Hours before she was to leave, the maid devised a plan to take revenge on her employer.
As the maid left the home and got into her employer’s vehicle to go to the airport she claimed she had left something inside and said she needed to return to get it. She then went inside and returned a few minutes later. She then went to the airport with her employer and his wife, who did not have the least inkling that the maid would do something terrible inside the house.
When the couple returned home, they discovered their young baby missing. They asked the child’s grandmother, who lived with them, where he was. She told them that the maid had told her that the parents wanted to take him to the airport.
They then searched the house and found the child in the bathtub dead. The maid had punished her employers by drowning their child.
Now let us reflect on this story from the moral perspective and ask some serious questions. Would the maid have taken revenge if the mother had not abused her?
I am not justifying her actions; I believe what she did was cruel. However, an important question remains: Would she have done this if the woman in the home had been nice to her from the beginning?
We have some people who believe that slavery still exists. They unjustly treat people who were forced to come to serve them because of their circumstances back home. They forget that maids are people just like them. The poor conditions in their countries have forced them to leave their children and loved ones and work abroad as maids.
Do they not deserve to be treated nicely? Do they need us to make them suffer more? Why do we have to humiliate them?
The maids who work in the Kingdom are of different backgrounds and cultures. How do we expect them to learn when they cannot understand our requests simply because they speak a different language? When they fail to understand us, we unleash our anger on them.
When employers are told that maids cannot understand their language, they say, “Well the dumb maid cannot understand my language, what can I do?”
However, the dumb employer forgets that the maid is human and not an animal.
