With nearly 2 500 people killed in recent Israeli strikes on Lebanon, nobody in the country is safe, and the only help for Africans is from other migrant workers. (Photo by Ahmad Kaddoura/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Ida Yanoko, a domestic worker from Burkina Faso, fights back tears when she speaks about the uncertainty and terror of being caught in a war in a foreign land where she has never felt a sense of belonging or safety.
“My employers left the house at 10am. The bombings started an hour later,” says Yanoko, who was working under the “kafala” system for a family in southern Lebanon.
Yanoko frantically called her employer, begging for help, but they didn’t return. Not even when a missile landed right outside the home they abandoned her in, she says.
That was on 23 September, when the Israeli army began airstrikes in southern Lebanon. On that day alone, Israel killed 600 people and left thousands displaced. A month later, the fatalities had risen to at least 2 483 people, according to the Lebanese government. More than 1.2 million people have been displaced since October 2023.
Yanoko was eventually rescued by a fellow Burkinabè worker, Emmanuel. On his bicycle, they fled to a cramped apartment in Beirut’s Burj Hammoud, where other migrant workers had gathered.
In most cases, this kind of mutual aid is all that there is for these workers.
Every evening since early October, Viany Nguemakoue has distributed food and toiletries to shelters and safe houses in Beirut. The Cameroonian citizen is part of a collective of volunteers supporting migrant workers who have either been left behind by their employers or lost their jobs since Israeli airstrikes started hitting southern Lebanon this year.
Some are in informal shelters. Many others sleep on the streets. The need for help exceeds the support trickling in from voluntary donations by other migrant workers and online crowdfunding campaigns.
“We still need a lot, but for the moment we are just doing our best to survive,” says Nguemakoue.
The former domestic worker turned seamstress is responding to the need through a WhatsApp group that now has nearly 200 migrant workers asking for help. Elsewhere, in a cramped shelter in Doura, a suburb northeast of Beirut, 33 women are sharing a cramped shelter.
Some have severe injuries. They have little more than that.
“We don’t have enough food or water,” Aishatu John-Kamara says in a video note.
In the Burj Hammoud shelter, where Yanoko and her friend found refuge, mattresses lining the walls suggest a much larger household than can be fed by the meagre mound of food on a small table in the room.
The war-related displacement is compounded by problems caused by the controversial kafala labour system under which these workers are in Lebanon. It allows employers total control over migrant labourers and their legal status.
Many employers often confiscate the workers’ passports, and then treat them extremely poorly, knowing they can’t leave. Many leave anyway, but then can’t leave the country — even when the bombs fall from the sky. Instead, they shelter with each other in cramped quarters such as the ones in Doura and Burj Hammoud.
This mistreatment has nurtured mutual aid traditions that the workers have turned to under the fire of a new threat.
“Since the 1980s civil war, these communities have grown stronger and respond to emergencies by helping each other,” says Nofal Kareem, of the Anti-racism Movement in Lebanon.
Delphine, a migrant worker from Côte d’Ivoire who has been in Lebanon since 1992, now spends her days helping displaced families, including migrant workers, at Saint Joseph’s Church in Beirut.
“Last week, we prepared meals for over a hundred people,” she says.
Many migrant workers, previously seen as passive victims of the exploitative kafala system, are now rising to fight for their rights. Mariam Sesay from Sierra Leone is one of these voices.
“I once thought about ending my life. But now, I’m standing up to fight,” she said during a phone interview in August, before the conflict escalated.
She came to Lebanon a decade ago, and endured years of abuse under the kafala system before running away from her employers, preferring to take her chances on the streets. With help from the migrant community, she turned her life around, and today, she is a social worker and advocate, pushing for the abolition of the kafala system.
“We are victims, but we can also fight for our rights,” Sesay says.
She loves to cook and uses it both as a form of therapy and a way to share her culture. In the weeks before the Israeli war escalation, she was teaching cooking classes at The Great Oven, a community-based organisation in Beirut’s Geitawi neighbourhood.
The war has paused the classes but not the cooking. The Great Oven is now helping make food for displaced people.
Many terrified migrants want to return home.
At the shelter in Doura, Sierra Leonean Mariatu Kargbo says: “If I had a way to get out of this right now, I would. This is not easy for some of us with medical conditions.”
The 24-year-old says she suffers from a heart condition. She arrived in Lebanon in May, escaped her employers’ house after two months of what she describes as strenuous work conditions, and found other work as a cleaner at a bank.
The International Organisation for Migration (IOM) in Lebanon says it has received more than 700 new repatriation requests since the beginning of October. But attempts to leave are often complicated by the chaos of war and the legacy of the kafala system.
“A significant challenge is the limited operational capacity at Beirut’s airport due to the constrained availability of flights and the lack of dedicated funding to provide this support,” said IOM spokesperson Joe Lowry.
If the IOM were to wrangle the logistics, many migrants would not be able to immediately leave Lebanon.
“It’s been a very challenging situation because some do not have travel documentation and are unregistered,” says Chernor Bah, the minister of information for Sierra Leone.
He says the Sierra Leonean government has issued 100 temporary travel documents for its citizens in Lebanon who needed evacuation.
This article first appeared in The Continent, the pan-African weekly newspaper produced in partnership with the Mail & Guardian. It’s designed to be read and shared on WhatsApp. Download your free copy here
