Lucia Nekesa, a mother of five who had been sold off in the Middle East finally reunited with her family after a debilitating stay in the region known for harrowing tales of domestic workers living in conditions similar to slavery.
Speaking from her Maweni home in Nyali on Monday, September 23, the 40-year-old was overcome with emotion after she finally made her way back to her family.
She gave a chilling tale of how she was raped and sold from family to family while in Baghdad, Iraq during a torturous 10-month period.
“No one should go to Iraq or any other Middle East country to work as a domestic worker,” Nekesa told The Star.
She went on to reveal how overjoyed she was after she thought that she had successfully landed a well-paying job in Qatar.
Unknown to her she had been duped by an unscrupulous Kenyan recruitment agent and ended up working in Iraq.
A recruiter she only identified as Rahab was the chief architect of her petrifying ordeal in Baghdad.
“Rahab and her brother used to beat me whenever I was returned by employers. You see, I got sick from the beatings and could not cope with the amount of work they gave me. So they called me lazy,” the emotional Nekesa narrated.
“When I arrived there, there were like 12 other women there. I did not know I was sold. They told me I was going to work in another better place. The women there told me I had been sold,” she added.
She finally managed to send out a message to Haki Africa, a human rights organisation, kickstarting a chain of events that finally saw her journey back home.
“If possible the government should just ban travel to those places if one is going to work as a domestic worker,” she stated.
