A domestic worker’s pleas to leave Lebanon after facing abuse from her employers were left unresolved before she was found dead.

"God please help me," Faustina Tay sent to an activist group 18 hours before her death, according to Al Jazeera.

LEBANON: MFANYAKAZI WA NDANI AUAWA NA MWILI WAKE KUWEKWA CHINI YA GARI

> Raia wa Ghana, Faustina Tay (23), kabla ya kifo chake alituma ujumbe kwa Wanaharakati wa kutetea Wafanyakazi wa ndani

– Uchunguzi unaonesha alisukumwa kutoka juu ya ghorofa

Soma – https://t.co/yFuciqclni
pic.twitter.com/egIKEUV5dL

— Jamii Forums (@JamiiForums) March 25, 2020

Tay left Ghana, where she was running a noodle business in Accra, in order to earn more money to support her family. Her brother, Joshua Demanya, urged his sister not to go "because there have been stories of people who go there and suffer so much they run away."

Despite her brother's warning, Tay arrived in Lebanon on May 5, 2019.

The 23-year-old was overworked with little time off, and in November, she expressed regret.

"I should have stayed [and] continued with my business,” she texted her brother.

She asked her employers in January to return to Ghana, but they did not allow it.

“I paid $2,000, and I said, 'Take it easy on us, we'll let you travel after Ramadan,'" her employer, Hussein Dia, recalled telling her.

Dia then allegedly beat her for the first time before taking her to the agency that brought her over to work, where the owner Ali Kamal and his employee, Hussein, allegedly abused her.

Both denied the claims of physical violence.

"The state would have closed us a long time ago," if he abused his workers, Kamal said.

Kamal told Tay to work two more months in order to afford her flight home, but when March came, Tay told Canadian-based activist group, This Is Lebanon, that Dia refused to let her go. She was allegedly beaten again.

"My boss beat me mercilessly yesterday [and] dis (sic) morning he took me to the office [and] I was beaten again, this is the second time they beat me up in the office," Tay told the organizers.

According to Dia, the agency and Tay had come to an agreement that she would travel in July. Demanya says his sister agreed out of fear.

Tay had sent pictures to her brother on March 12 of her swollen hands, bruises on her forearms and a scratch under her eye all from the abuse she endured.

"I'm very, very weak. Please, help me. Help me to go back to my country for treatment. Please, I don't want to die here,” she said in a voice message.

On March 14 her body was found in a parking lot under Dia’s home in the suburbs of Beirut between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m.

Her death was caused by a head injury “as a result of falling from a high place and crashing into a solid body,” according to a police report. “No marks of physical assault” were found.

There were no signs of struggle in Dia's home, and her death is being investigated as a suicide.

Dia said he and his family were asleep at the time of Tay’s death.

"I never laid a hand on her,” he said.

In the week of her death, Tay had sent over 40 minutes of voice messages to her brother and This Is Lebanon, according to Pulse.

Human Rights Watch found in 2010 that employers are not held accountable for abuse by Lebanon’s judiciary.

Security agencies don’t "adequately investigate claims of violence or abuse."

According to Lebanon’s general security intelligence agency, two domestic workers die each week, many by falling from buildings while trying to escape. Many workers are under the kafala system which ties their legal residence to their employers, which in turn makes it difficult to end the contract. The system leads to abuse of many kinds such as nonpayment of wages, no time to rest, physical abuse and sexual assault.

Tay’s case was brought to the attention of Lebanon's Labour Ministry by Al Jazeera. They told the outlet Tay's former employers will be blacklisted if there's evidence her death was in any way linked to any abuses she suffered at their hands.

Ghanian-Women

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