Mangaluru, Sept 23: For more than a year Jacintha Mendonca lived like a bonded labourer in remote area in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, thinking he would never see his family again.
Jacinta Mendonca with her daughters Velita and Vineetha at the press conference in Udupi on Saturday
The 47-year-old woman from Mudrangady near Karkala in Udupi district, who was dubed by a duped by a recruitment agency and trafficked to Saudi Arabia around 14 months ago, returned home safely on September 22.
Narrating her horror in the Gulf country, Jacintha said that she was allowed to eat the leftover food after working for nearly 20 hours and taking care of her employer’s 28 children.
“My Kafeel (sponsor/employer) has three wives. The first wife has 16 children, second 11 and the third wife, a 28-year-old, had a year-old baby. They all stayed in adjacent mansions and I was the only maid taking care of all them," said Jacintha.
"My day began at 6am. One of the wives used kick me to wake me up. I worked in all three mansions till 2am. Sometimes, the children used to wake me up in the middle of the night. They would pour water on my face or yank my hair, if I took time to wake up. My health started to deteriorate with no sleep and food. I refused to eat the leftover food and survived only on water, biscuit, tea and canned juices. They showed no mercy when I pleaded that I was too ill to work," recalled Jacintha of her ordeal.
Jacintha fled from the house on November 28. To her bad luck, a neighbour on the pretext of directing her to the Indian embassy took her to the police station. Police took her back to her employer.
The worse was to come after Jacintha's attempt to escape. The abuse got brutal now. "Four men beat me up black and blue, slammed my head against the wall. One of them caught my jaw while another pulled my hair from behind. I injured my jaw. They then threw me on the bed. For four days, I couldn't speak a word or swallow. My face was swollen," recalled a shocked Jacintha.
Jacintha never got her salary on time and had to beg for it. They never entertained any calls from her children and saw to it that she never had a cellphone.
Background
It was after the death of her husband last year that Ms. Mendonca, looking for a job, came upon an advertisement for a home nurse for an Indian family in Qatar. She contacted the Mumbai-based recruitment agency which assured her that she would be paid Rs. 25,000 a month.
The agent promised he would arrange for her passport and the visa through his representative in Mangaluru. Ms. Mendonca made her journey to Mumbai and was then taken to Dubai via Goa and Delhi on June 10, 2016, along with two other women. To her horror, on landing, she discovered that she had been taken to Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, instead of Qatar. Her plea to her employer to allow her to return fell on deaf ears. She tried to flee from her employer’s house on November 28, 2016. A neighbour, instead of taking her to the Indian embassy, led her to the police station, and she was returned to her employer. “That night, I was beaten black and blue in the house,” Ms. Mendonca recalled.
Her employer told her that the agents who sent Ms. Mendonca to Saudi Arabia had taken 24,000 Saudi Arabian Riyals from him, and he would allow her to return home only if the entire amount was repaid.
In December 2016, she got lucky. Ms. Mendonca managed to contact her children in Mudrangady with the help of a driver. Her children were advised by the local church to contact the Human Rights Protection Foundation (HRPF). Ravindranath Shanbhag, president of HRPF, said the children had no details, except some phone numbers. In time the HRPF found out that Ms. Mendonca had gone to Saudi on a visiting visa of 90 days.
The visa was arranged by a Delhi-based travel agency, blacklisted by the Ministry of External Affairs. “This led us to suspect that it could be a case of human trafficking,” said Dr. Shanbhag. The HRPF then contacted the Ministry of External Affairs, the Indian embassy, and the NRI Forum in Riyadh. There was every possibility of Ms. Mendonca’s arrest and imprisonment because of the duration of the visa.
But the NRI Forum was able to gather details of the case and negotiated with Ms. Mendonca’s employer to reduce the amount demanded by him. The forum also arranged a work permit for her from the Labour Department, and this facilitated her return home, Dr. Shanbhag said.
.
Comments
Add new comment