The Foreign Service Journal, December 2013

32 DECEMBER 2013 | THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL dusty desert of Doha. Lola eased the small frustrations of my life. My very young children came to love her, which I also grew to see as an inevitable, if strangely cosmopolitan good. During that year Lola and I talked a great deal, sharing stories about our lives. I learned more about the dynamics that actually brought her to the Middle East, besides grinding poverty. Her family situation was incredibly complicated, and while she was in Qatar to earn money for her children, her being there also relieved some personal burdens. We talked about her children, but she also shared stories of friends and acquaintances caught in tragic employment situations—disgusting stories of frequent sexual moles- tation, and verbal and physical abuse. (These narratives are depressingly common among domestic workers, as are stories of female domestic employees “falling” from upper story windows.) “There are only two kinds of people I’ll work for,” Lola once told me thoughtfully, “the Americans and the Danes. They are the only ones who treat their nannies well.” I was glad that she felt happy in our family, and I loved that she felt I was doing right by her. But was I? While it benefited her that I was a firm believer in inalienable human rights, I cannot claim to have materi- ally advanced her situation toward greater acquisition of those rights. The horrific stories we hear from nannies about their compatriots living in difficult households or that are written up in the newspaper enrage us. But I think they also assuage our moral burdens by making the other dehumanizing aspects of kafala pale by comparison. Lola and her distant children were dependent on our family’s good graces to pay her regularly, treat her fairly and honor our commitments in her contract with us. Yet we could have just as easily denied her basic human and labor rights—and no one would have known, or acted to stop us if they had. In fact, kafala culture looks down on those who are too “soft” toward their employees. In Jordan, we sponsored two domestic workers at different times. The first, Jennie, was also from the Philippines, and dutifully sent money back to support her mother, brothers and sisters, and their families. She started working full-time at age 12 in a clothing factory—“nice clothes; Gap, that kind of stuff, Madam”—where she earned pen- nies for her labor. Her widowed mother could not support her six children with her own meager earnings. Already accustomed to The same arguments were once used to justify the American enslavement of Africans: “They’re somuch better off than where they came from.” iStock.com/Mari