The Foreign Service Journal, December 2013

28 DECEMBER 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL Laura Merzig Fabrycky is a Foreign Service spouse. She has resided in Doha, Qatar and Amman, where she worked as a part-time Eligible Family Member. The views expressed here are the author’s alone. What makes the kafala system so morally unsettling is the way it exploits vulnerable populations while claiming to be a benign safety net for them. BY LAURA MERZ I G FABRYCKY RETHINKING THE ROLE OF ‘MADAM’: KAFALA AND THE U.S. FOREIGN SERVICE I am the spouse of a Foreign Service officer and the mother of two young daughters. During our recent tours in Qatar and Jordan, our family employed women to work in our home, which enabled me to volunteer and work part time outside of our home. They kept our apartment clean and tidy and, most importantly, they cared lovingly for our children. Their presence in our home, like our embassy-issued furniture, was also utterly ordinary. Employing domestic workers—nannies, housekeepers, cooks or garden- ers—during an overseas posting in the Middle East (and elsewhere) is common for Foreign Service families. Even our previous embassy’s Community Liaison Office handbook speaks of domestic help as “one of the perks of living abroad.” In the Middle East, this “attractive” domestic-employee FEATURE relationship is part of the larger kafala system for non-immigrant workers from other countries. Fromwhat I observed, it is a system in which the laws governing how domestic employees are treated are deliberately weak and their enforcement universally pathetic. The result is a morally suspect arrangement in which thousands of mostly South and Southeast Asian “guest workers” are trapped. The culture of kafala horrifies me, but during our years in the Middle East, I also came to see myself as a full participant in it. I amwriting about that personal dilemma in the hope of spurring a conversation within the Foreign Service community that might lead to more constructive, sustained moral reflection and action among other Americans and expatriates on this topic. How I Understand Kafala Kafala, the Arabic word for sponsorship, is the legal system by which many Middle Eastern countries, in the Persian Gulf and elsewhere, permit entry to non-immigrant laborers—typically from India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka or Indonesia. Through a