Sri Lankan Maids Serve Purpose at Home, Away

The 50 women gathered in the classroom know what to say when a prospective employer demands a haircut.

“Sorry, madam, I like long hair. In Sri Lanka we keep long hair. But madam, I will wear a cap when I cook,” the pupils parrot in unison.

“Very good,” their teacher responds. “Always remember: Madams do not like hair in their food.”

Armed with such tips from the 24 schools that train Sri Lankans to work as maids overseas, tens of thousands of women leave this impoverished Indian Ocean island every year in search of work.

Last year, they sent $736 million back to their families, making them second only to textile exports in earning foreign currency for Sri Lanka.

With the country’s economy shattered by 14 years of civil war, many women are compelled to leave in search of work, despite reports of maids being abused abroad and worries about who will raise their children at home. One in every eight working-age Sri Lankans doesn’t have a job, and many of those who do work find it hard to make ends meet.

The average salary of a government clerk in Colombo is $80 to $100 a month. In the Middle East, the standard maid’s salary is $100 a month, plus room and board. Cyprus offers the most lucrative salary, $300 plus expenses.

The government says 84% of the 600,000 Sri Lankans working abroad are women, and almost all the women have jobs as maids. Sri Lanka’s population is 18 million.

The phenomenon is common to poor countries across Asia. Roman Catholic Cardinal Jaime Sin of the Philippines, whose country is perhaps best known for exporting maids, once called the millions of Filipino women working far from home “heroes” for providing for their families.

Swarna Damayanthi signed up for classes at a maid training school because she signed on to work in Kuwait after an accident left her husband unable to work as a laborer earning 100 rupees ($1.72) a day.

She worries about leaving her two teenage sons and 12-year-old daughter, but says she had no choice.

“I am going because all of us will live happily after I return,” Damayanthi said.

Susanthi Fernando, at 22 the youngest in the class and headed to a maid’s job in Bahrain, said: “I know my two brothers, one sister and parents will miss me, but I will send them all my money.”

The training center caters to women who have already been promised overseas jobs. The maids-in-waiting put in eight hours a day for two weeks, learning to iron clothes, change diapers and deal with potential problems.

“I know the do’s and the don’ts,” Fernando said. “Don’t look at men. Don’t wear thin clothes. Don’t be alone with a man, and if he tries something funny, just run out of the house.”

There have been reports of Sri Lankans being sold from house to house like slaves by agents or being raped by employers.

Three Sri Lankan maids sought refuge at their country’s embassy in Kuwait in August, saying their employers had tortured them. The Kuwait Times published photographs of the three women showing what it called signs they had been scalded with boiling water and beaten.

The maids go places ordinary Sri Lankan men have never set foot--to China, to Greece, to North Yemen, to Fiji. Sri Lankan maids were working in Lebanon at the peak of the civil war there.

“We realized, though a little late, that we must take care of our housemaids going abroad,” said Kusal Perera, a spokesman for the Sri Lankan Bureau of Foreign Employment.

Sri Lankan women had been traveling overseas for work for nearly two decades before the government took steps to protect them in 1995. It now tries to keep track of them by making it compulsory for anyone going abroad for employment to register with the government.

The government also provides free insurance that the maids can use to buy a return airline ticket if they run into trouble, and it offers low-interest housing loans.

The Sri Lankan government recorded 5,900 cases of various form of harassment of maids by their foreign employers last year.

There are pitfalls at home as well. Would-be maids are often duped by agents who promise jobs, pocket “fees” and then disappear.