For the past 10 days, Farah Salka and her team of staff and volunteers at a Lebanese anti-racism organisation have answered thousands of desperate messages from women who have nowhere to hide from the bombs. Before the start of the Israeli airstrikes, Salka’s job as head of Lebanon’s Anti-Racism Movement (Arm) involved advocating and campaigning for the rights of Lebanon’s 400,000 migrant workers.
Now, she and her team have become frontline workers, struggling to find shelter and protection for overseas domestic workers from countries such as Ethiopia and Sierra Leone, who have found themselves abandoned by their Lebanese employers and with no way of getting home.
“To be frank, the situation facing many of the migrant workers we support in Lebanon was horrendous even before the bombing started, but now we are seeing women who have come here to work as domestic workers thrown out on the street like used washing machines, left behind inside houses while their Lebanese employers flee danger, or just dumped on the side of the road to fend for themselves in a war-torn country where many don’t speak the language,” she says.
The past weeks of aerial bombardment by the Israeli government have led to a huge wave of internal displacement in south Lebanon, with 1.2 million people – about 20% of the population – forced to leave their homes and communities and seek shelter elsewhere.
Frontline workers say that as more displaced people have arrived in the capital, Beirut, seeking shelter from bombing in the city’s southern suburbs, hundreds of migrant workers and refugees have been left homeless, with no way of accessing food or sanitation.
In Beirut’s Martyrs’ Square, groups of migrant workers are sleeping out in the open, some lying on thin mattresses on the ground, others in makeshift shelters constructed from whatever they can find on the streets.
“Amid the chaos of displacement, we are seeing huge numbers of migrant workers, including many women, who are utterly alone and helpless, being turned away from formal shelters because they are not Lebanese and sleeping on the street with no protection. They have no way of getting home,” says Salka.
Last week, the UN said the 900 government-run schools converted into shelters across Lebanon were already full. Those who failed to secure a space have found refuge with friends and family or are sheltering in abandoned homes, hotels or empty nightclubs.
Yet many of the people that groups such as Arm are trying to help have nowhere to go.
In the shadow of the blue domes of the Mohammed al-Amin mosque, a wire frame designed to hold the square’s Christmas tree, draped in black and white banners emblazoned with the words “Beirut never dies”, has been converted into a tent for people to huddle under.
“This guy is from Sudan, we are all from Bangladesh. Over there, all those women are from Syria,” says Raju Mrija, a Bangladeshi migrant worker, as he points towards a dozen women sitting on blankets in the centre of the square. Mrija says he fled Beirut’s southern suburbs with a group of other Bangladeshi migrant workers a week ago, after an Israeli airstrike close to their house.
“There was a huge blast – we were all terrified. Everyone ran into the street then found their way here. At least here it’s a kind of safe zone,” he says.
Alongside Mrija and the other Bangladeshi workers is a group from Sudan, their suitcases piled high next to a gas canister. They say they have little hope of their government evacuating them to their home country, which is in the grip of a violent civil conflict.
In the square, Jamileh Begum, a domestic worker from Bangladesh, says that she and the other workers haven’t attempted to find a place in a shelter, sensing they would be unwelcome after migrant workers were told the shelters would be open to Lebanese citizens only.
“I used to work as a housekeeper,” says Begum, adjusting her red and blue chequered headscarf and clutching a backpack. “But now we are left without any money. We didn’t want to come [to Beirut], but we had to flee.”
Begum says that she and the others sleeping in the square are dependent on food donations from volunteers and charities, which are scrambling to help those in the makeshift camps that have sprung up across the city.
Salka says: “Small frontline groups and volunteers, many of them women, are shouldering the response of this catastrophe on the ground. The work they are doing is astonishing but they are tired, they are scared . Nothing we are doing is sustainable, there is close to zero support from those who are mandated to be providing it and the overall picture is so bleaky.”
One woman coordinating humanitarian aid to Syrian refugees, who did not want to be named in case it affected her work, says the situation for the Syrian refugee community is “desperate”.
“In the last few weeks, we have been trying to help those who can get back over the border. But now that route is getting too dangerous and we have also heard reports of people who have gone back being arrested,” she says.
“Syrians here in Beirut, who have survived the civil war at home and the bombardment of Aleppo, are traumatised by what is happening. They are not being allowed into the shelters and are facing hostility on the streets. They have no way of feeding themselves or their families,” she says. “We try to tell them everything is going to be OK, but we are afraid this is only the beginning.”
