Little Maids of Morocco

Khadija Raji has lived in a roomy, middle-class home across the street from King Mohammed VI’s Casablanca palace for almost two years. There’s a courtyard with flowers, and plenty of food to eat. She wears a clean white Pokemon T-shirt tucked stiffly into a pleated navy skirt. Her brown face and arms are well-scrubbed; she wears a slim bracelet that slips over five midsummer mosquito bites on her left wrist.

But this is not Khadija’s house. Her parents and siblings live in a mud-packed shack hours from here. Her parents had too many mouths to feed, so 18 months ago they sent their then 8-year-old daughter here to work as an $18-a-month domestic servant for Fatima Alaoui, a sickly 72-year-old widow. Khadija, now 10, is not allowed to play with children in the neighborhood, has no toys and sleeps on the long yellow couch in the entryway. Her noodly legs don’t even reach halfway down the couch’s length. There is no one to hug her, to remember her birthday, to brush her hair. She misses chasing roosters with her little brother Si Mohammed most of all.

“I never cry about it, though,” she says, puffing out her chest and resting her hands on her slight hips.

At an age when American “tweenies” plaster posters of Britney Spears and The Powerpuff Girls on their walls and instant-message their girlfriends about Aaron and Nick Carter, Khadija wakes before 8 to serve her mistress breakfast, wash the dishes, sweep the floors and serve the cakes and sandwiches she has made for Alaoui’s grandchildren. She usually eats alone in the kitchen.

Despite everything, her employer is convinced she is doing God’s will, helping out a poor soul. “She is lucky,” Alaoui says. “I have never even laid a hand on her.” But according to a U.S. State Department report released this summer, the leathery grandmother is a party to people trafficking. Money is changing hands, and Khadija never got to choose if she wanted to work. Nonetheless, when compared with the desperate lots of an estimated 14,000 other child maids in the achingly beautiful North African country of Morocco, Khadija is indeed fortunate. Girls as young as 5 are regularly sent from the drought-stricken countryside to work as petites bonnes--the common, if derogatory, term for girl maids that’s a holdover from Morocco’s days as a French protectorate. They work in homes where they sometimes are forced to sleep on the floor, work 16-hour days, eat scraps, endure physical, sexual and psychological abuse and live in abject loneliness. It’s common for the woman of the house to lop off a little maid’s hair and dress her in rags and a head scarf--anything to remind the child of her lower rank and to strip her of any femininity that might attract her husband’s ardor. Some girls have been chained up when their employers go away for the weekend. Others have been starved to death, burnt with irons, or raped and thrown out the door once their tummies swell with pregnancy. There also are documented cases of girls being killed at their bosses’ hands. And the girls never see a dime. It all goes to their fathers.

For centuries in Morocco, rural girls have been temporarily entrusted to uncles and aunts living in big cities such as Casablanca, Rabat, Marrakech and Fes. Parents reasoned that their daughters had an opportunity for education and to learn to cook and manage a household. Many also feel the urban sophistication the girls pick up while working in the cities would make them more attractive brides.

But with the economic demise brought by six years of drought during the past decade, rural families have become truly desperate in this kingdom, where 60% of the population is younger than 25 and 75% of the country’s poor live in rural areas. Little girls are paying the price, being farmed out to employers, sometimes even extended family, in what critics say is a modern-day slave trade.

The demand is skyrocketing, especially in the financial metropolis of Casablanca. More than ever, Moroccan women are entering the workplace--about one-third of Moroccan households now have two incomes--yet the domestic duties of working women remain the same. Adult maids cost as much as $100 a month--an impossible sum for many in a country where the minimum wage is $45 a week. Better to find a young girl you can “train,” who is more malleable, who won’t talk back or give you trouble about wanting time off. Often placed with employers by opportunistic middlemen called smasarya, Moroccan girls sometimes find themselves ensnared in a complex web created by poverty, religious tradition and culture, as well as the belief of many employers that they are doing good by giving the girls work.

The subject of little maids has long been hshuma--taboo--in this Islamic country, akin to discussing sex in public. Many people recognize the girls’ vulnerability, but few will talk about it. The dialogue has opened up during the past year, though, largely thanks to Morocco’s 38-year-old King Mohammed VI, crowned two years ago. Dubbed the “king of the poor,” Mohammed VI has declared a holy war on illiteracy and has called for massive aid for girls’ education. An estimated 85% of rural women in Morocco are illiterate. Higher literacy rates for women usually mean lower infant mortality, lower birthrates and a greater likelihood that daughters will be educated rather than being sent to work as servants in the cities.

One of the new king’s most surprising moves was to allow his sister, Princess Lalla Meryem, to launch an unprecedented campaign in December to sensitize Moroccans to the plight of the girl maids. The joint effort between UNICEF and the National Observatory for Children’s Rights, which she heads, included dozens of urban billboards featuring a kerchiefed, weary little girl leaning on a broom or washing dishes in a bucket, as well as radio and TV spots and ads in magazines. Moroccans are reminded that, “Thinking about her future is our chore,” a reference to the princess’ call to send all little maids to the literacy classes now springing up in major cities. While most of the courses are run by nongovernment organizations, some receive funding--even teachers--from the government.

Next week, the princess will travel to New York to represent Morocco at the United Nations Special Session on the Child, the biggest international meeting on children’s rights in a decade. While Morocco has miles to go before it can boast universal respect for its children, some feel the frank self-examination and progress of the past year offers hope to other places in the world where the child-labor problem seems intractable. “I think the greatest impact Morocco has made in human rights over the past year is to take away the taboo from the subject of little maids,” says Rajae Berrada, with UNICEF in Morocco. “More and more, people are realizing that a girl who works as a domestic is a victim of child exploitation.”

Some--especially Westerners--criticize Morocco’s awareness campaign as insufficient. Why doesn’t Morocco ban the use of child maids and force them all to go to school? Unfortunately, easy answers are elusive. The cultural differences in this country--where subsidized school lunches, GameBoys and truant officers are not the norm--represent one of the greatest challenges anti-child labor advocates face around the globe. How do you overcome generations of tradition, as well as deny Morocco’s poorest citizens a way to survive?

According to a recent study by the Moroccan League for the Protection of Children, 25% of the little maids are younger than 10. Seventy-two percent of them wake before 7 a.m. and nearly as many work until 11 p.m. Eighty-one percent work seven days a week, and two-thirds have to work even when they are ill.

“Even if parents love their daughters, sometimes the question boils down to: ‘Do I want her to work or do I want her to survive?’ ” says Chakib Guessous, a Casablanca physician and sociologist whose book on child labor in Morocco, “Exploited Innocence,” will be published this fall. “Often a family says they treat their bonne well--we’ve taken her in, we dress her well, do her hair nicely, feed her well; she’s rosy and chubby, happy. “But that’s on one level. This little girl also needs affection. When she eats all alone, she doesn’t share in the life of those around her. When she’s off in the living room--without friends or the other kids in the family--she doesn’t speak. Often she completes her day without talking at all. She doesn’t have a chance to discuss or share her opinions. That’s vital for a child of this age. A 10-year-old needs her mother’s warmth, to be comforted by her father. She needs to be with her brothers and sisters, to play with them.”

Khadija wants to be a teacher when she grows up “and only have two children . . . that’s enough.” But Guessous says girls like Khadija are at risk for less than storybook endings. Because they lack an education and often become sexually active very early since they’re starved for affection, they are more likely to fall into prostitution as they grow older--both selling their bodies and engaging in premarital sex, which is considered prostitution under Islamic law. (The brothels of Morocco’s infamous Middle Atlas town of El Hajeb are full of former child maids.)

Despite all of the accords Morocco has signed, including the U.N. Convention on the Rights of the Child, which laid out the basic rights of all children, and, this spring, the International Labor Organization’s Convention 138 to raise the legal age of a worker to 15, the country has struggled to enforce these protections.

Some concede that a child labor ban in this kingdom is simply premature. “To be honest, we cannot just eliminate the phenomenon today. Families need to eat,” says Nezha Chekrouni, Morocco’s Minister for Women and the Family. “Yes, it is dramatic, but that is our reality. What we can do is start telling families that these little girls also have rights.”

Children “have a right to learn, to enjoy life, and they have a right to hope,” agrees Marc Ginsburg, former U.S. ambassador to Morocco, now pursuing private business ventures in Washington, D.C. “We shouldn’t be penalizing Morocco for employing children the way they’ve employed children for hundreds of years. What we should be doing is calling on Morocco to change those conditions so that their lives and educational opportunities are better than they were in the past.” As for criticism that King Mohammed VI isn’t fixing his country’s social ills fast enough, Ginsburg replies, “If he hasn’t solved them in two years, then he’ll solve them in five.”

At times Ginsburg’s prediction seems overly optimistic. When you travel through the desert and the Atlas mountains, it is easier to understand why the problem persists, and why parents such as Khadija’s send their daughters away. People are destitute here. Children shuffle their bare feet through red dust and beg for candies and coins--”Un dirham, s’il vous plait!” They sit on the side of the unpaved mountain pass and run into traffic whenever a car passes, imploring you to buy dates, mushrooms and the geodes they’ve hammered from the cliffs. Women and young girls crouch to wash clothes in gray puddles, where rivers gushed before the rains stopped. They spread the wet clothes to dry on the mountain face. Girls with sun-blistered faces file along the side of the road, their arms heavy with buckets of water they’ve collected from wells miles away. Children slap their crooks on the backs of wayward sheep. The better-off families whiz by on mules.

Still, the girls in the Berber village of Aot Iktel, in the High Atlas Mountains about 60 miles above Marrakech, have been doing something revolutionary--going to school instead of heading to the cities as maids. For the past 2 1/2 years, the village’s daughters, ages 10 to 18, have squeezed two to a desk into a low-roofed, one-room schoolhouse to learn Arabic, basic math and marketable trades such as sewing and embroidery. No boys are allowed. Village officials say it’s the girls who need attention these days.

Sixteen-year-old Nezha Bouaouch blushes when asked what life was like before she started classes here two years ago. “I was a shepherdess. I spent the entire day leading my family’s goats from one grazing patch to another.” An adolescent smirk reaches all the way to her cheeks, fat as plums. “It was really boring.”

Her 17-year-old desk mate, Mina Amezdaou, is an exquisite young woman with the eyes, carved features and lanky limbs that could easily have landed her on a high-fashion catwalk if she’d been born anywhere but on this hilltop. Now, she explains, most of the girls who’ve been working as maids have come home “because they can find work in the village, learn to read and be closer to their families. It’s wonderful. Boys get too much attention around here already.” She waves her hands, palms blackened with henna paste, and boasts: “I don’t have to worry about getting sent to the city because I am learning embroidery and sewing. I am very smart, you know.”

Khadija is one of dozens of girl maids across Casablanca whose employers allowed her to enroll in pilot literacy programs earlier this year. Since January, she has joined about 50 other maids for 2 1/2 hours every weekday afternoon at the only school she has ever known. In addition to basic Arabic reading and writing, the local nongovernment organization, Association des Bienfaiteurs de Derb Sultan, sponsors courses in math, biology, sports, art and music.

One of the association members, Hassan Anka Idriss, says, “It’s overwhelming to see how these girls light up, start laughing. Little Khadija was very withdrawn and wary when she first came. She has blossomed.”

Asked to write her name, Khadija sticks her tongue in the side of her cheek to stifle a giggle, rolls her brown marble eyes to the side and offers an oblique smile. She leans over the table, drags her green pen right to left and beams when she is praised for her accomplishment.

The quality of life for little maids such as Khadija varies as much as the accounts of the children and their employers. For example, Fatima Alaoui’s adult daughter, Amina, is visiting her mother for lunch, along with her two daughters, as the housewife does every day. To her, Khadija, the child who serves her children, is “very mischievous. She’s always getting into trouble.” As she speaks, her girls--including 13-year-old Mounia--lounge on traditional brocade couches in their grandmother’s salon as Khadija serves syrupy spearmint tea and almond pastries. When she is finished, this girl who still enjoys Mickey Mouse cartoons sits down--not on the sofa, but on a wood chair in the corner that faces away from everyone. Her white canvas sneakers dangle above the floor.

Amina is eager to convey how lucky the child is, that Khadija does “minor work, answering the door, setting the table--nothing, really. She plays a lot, all the time.” She explains that the family never sends the girl out alone to do shopping because “she’s too young.” Nonetheless, away at school, Khadija later boasts about how she goes to the grocer for milk and bread “even at 8, when it’s dark out. I’m never afraid.”

Khadija’s mother had visited the day before to pick up the child’s salary. They spent a few hours together, but they had no time alone, not even to take a walk together. Khadija’s parents are extremely poor. She has four brothers and two older sisters. Her father built their two-room home of packed mud bricks, but without electricity or running water. He guards apple and orange orchards at night and earns less than $10 a week, well below Morocco’s poverty line of $63 per week for a family their size. Their diet is mostly bread. In the winter of 2000, Khadija’s parents decided to send her and her 10-year-old sister to work as maids, just as they had done with her 14-year-old sister. Their mother started knocking on doors in an upper middle-class neighborhood with the two girls in tow. After many slammed doors and polite “No, thank yous,” they finally arrived at the home of Fatima Alaoui. The woman agreed to hire Khadija for a low salary since the child was so scrawny and would be unable to do strenuous work for a few years.

About the time Khadija began working in this grimy, gray city, another little maid named Aicha decided to run away from her employers.

Police found the 10-year-old child huddled on a dusty curb, her head shaved, her small frame dwarfed by an oversize apron. Her malnourished limbs were purple with burns and bruises. Aicha had just escaped from a home where she worked as a little maid. After five years of scrubbing floors, tending babies, washing clothes and being slapped and humiliated for her every misstep, the girl told authorities that she took to the streets. For the next four months she lived at the Centre Bennani in Casablanca, Morocco’s only detention center for girls--a multipurpose facility that offers social services and foster care, and also serves as a juvenile detention center where little girls such as Aicha live side by side with under-18 drug dealers, prostitutes, even murderers. Seventy percent of the 236 girls boarded in the facility--designed for 150--are former child maids.

At least Aicha was no longer being hurt, and she even started learning to read, play games and make friends. But then she grew ill. A brain tumor began to wither her already frail body, and she ended up in a Casablanca government hospital. Despite bedside pleas from her caregivers, she refused to offer any hints of her origins beyond her father’s first name. All they knew was that she was a Berber, and that her accent was most likely from the High Atlas Mountains.

She told them she could not forgive her father for betraying her. “He’s the one who forced me to become a maid. It’s his fault,” she told Marie Jeanne Astruc, a Frenchwoman who volunteers at Centre Bennani, from her hospital bed. “I never want to see him again. He might send me back to work.”

So on Aicha’s death certificate, she was listed--no more, no less--as “Aicha Bint Ahmed.” Aicha, daughter of Ahmed.

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The Maid Brokers

One goal of a UNICEF and Moroccan government-sponsored survey of Morocco’s little maids is to trace the underground network of smasarya, who “broker” the placement of Morocco’s little maids with their employers. The results of a first-of-its kind study are scheduled for release in time for the princess’ visit to the U.N. next week, but it’s not hard to independently confirm the existence of that network.

I follow a map a woman had scribbled on a napkin for me. No address, she’d said, just follow a central boulevard, look for a Renault dealership in a round plaza, keep going and look for a corner cafe a few blocks later. Mohamed is indeed there, and he is ready for business. In a Casablanca alley reeking of urine, childhood is for sale.

Mohamed’s curbside “office” is a plastic orange chair, red Coca-Cola crate and an inexplicable butane tank. He has one milky gray eye and a mouthful of yellow snaggleteeth. I pose as an Italian professional who will soon be moving to the city. I tell him I need some domestic help, “an older, sturdier woman and a little one, about waist high.” He smiles and motions to the top of the side street. Two girls quickly appear. “Will they do?” he asks.

“The one on the left is fine,” I say of the rail-thin 20-year-old fidgeting with her cream-colored djellaba. But the shy 16-year-old with the silver necklace at her throat, I say, is too big. “I want a really little one--you know, to create less trouble.” His initial protests wear down with the lure of cash, and he says he can find me a 10-year-old maid by the next morning. The cost: $28. The next day I return, with a male driver in case there is trouble, and Mohamed apologizes that he hadn’t been able to “secure” a young girl.

“I am sorry,” he says. “It’s just too tough to find the young ones nowadays. The police have been cracking down.”

At that point, I tell Mohamed I am a journalist, and ask if I can take his picture. To my surprise, he agrees.

Another broker also suggested that the continuing public-awareness campaign about the plight of child maids is working. But my conversation with that broker, Hassan Bahja, also makes clear the scope of the problem. Bahja estimates that he has placed 600 girls in six years. Lately, price doesn’t matter. Families will settle for little or no compensation as long as the employer agrees to feed their daughter.

Bahja insists he doesn’t get paid, at least by the families supplying the girls, and won’t elaborate on any fees he charges the families seeking to hire the girls. When pressed, he says he has received a few “gifts” from pleased families--a cell phone, a jar of prized Berber rancid butter and a hand-tied carpet.

“I do this work for Allah,” he says. “I am a humanitarian. It’s not for money.” There are skeptics, among them Njat M’jid, a pediatrician who has become the heroine of Casablanca’s street kids since founding Bayti, a center that rehabilitates homeless children. “Hah! That man is getting money--and a lot of it,” alleges M’jid, who, with funding from UNICEF, also sponsored a literacy program for girl maids in Casablanca’s blue-collar Sidi Bernoussi neighborhood. Two of the little girls from that program, 8 and 10 years old, are going back to school full time in their villages this fall.

The dealers who arranged placements for little girls like those, she says, “are the real problem. They especially exploit mothers who are desperate to send their children away from the drought areas. They tell the parents she’ll be treated well, properly dressed and fed, maybe even find a husband. These creeps get paid twice--by the family and the employer.”-- E.A.C.