In 2009, at just 24, Melissa walked out of an abusive marriage, determined to rebuild her life.
She hoped the pain was behind her. Instead, what awaited her was a descent into exploitation so profound it felt inconceivable – the kind of nightmare one prays is only a dream.
She met an overseas recruitment agent on Facebook, a man who promised her a fresh start in Qatar as a front office worker. He spoke the language of opportunity: steady income, dignity, and a chance to stand on her feet again.
But when she arrived at the airport, suitcase in hand, the truth landed with the weight of betrayal.
“I only came to know I was bound for Beirut at the airport. I protested, but he told me there was no turning back,” she recalls.
The plane touched down in Lebanon, and with it, every illusion she had held dissolved.
She was ushered into a large hall packed with more than 500 girls - exhausted faces, anxious eyes, bodies that carried both hope and fear.
In that instant, she realised she had stepped into a world where girls like her were commodities.
“They tried to take my passport”
Melissa is educated – she holds a diploma in information technology. She arrived expecting work, not bondage. When she resisted the degrading treatment...
She was thrown into a police cell for hours, her stomach tight with dread.
Eventually, a man arrived - her “sponsor”.
A sponsor, she explains, is the person who buys a migrant worker. The one to whose household she is assigned. The one who pays for the passport, air ticket and controls the worker’s every movement.
“They tried to take my passport,” she says. “I refused. I fought. They gave up, but I could see they marked me as a ‘difficult Kenyan’.”
She was to earn $250 (Sh32,312) a month.
Her sponsor, she says, treated her kindly and remains a friend. But another man in the household - a mentally challenged adult - turned her life into a nightmare.
“He filmed me… even in the shower”
“He would masturbate in front of me,” she says.
“He took photos and videos of my bottom when I was mopping or bathing. Sometimes he sneaked into my bedroom and filmed me while I was dressing.”
For two months she endured, hoping someone - anyone - would notice the danger she was in.
Then one day, it escalated. He burst into her room, finding her naked. On one hand, a phone recording her. In the other, a knife. She screamed.
Her sponsor rushed in and pulled him out.
“I told him, ‘I cannot stay here anymore.’ He understood. He let me go,” she says.
A new home, the same despair
The agent placed her in another home, this time to care for an elderly woman. The family treated her with warmth, even allowing her to use their laptop - a small mercy that allowed her to locate the Kenyan consulate for help.
But wages became another form of abuse.
“They paid me $50 the first month. The second month too. Nothing more,” she says.
She couldn’t survive on that. She needed to escape.
A sympathetic taxi driver linked her to Burundians, who then connected her to Kenyans who had abandoned their abusive employers and turned to sex work to survive.
She couldn’t bring herself to do it.
Instead, she became vocal about the welfare of Kenyan migrant workers and eventually secured work at the Kenyan consulate, where she offered translation services to earn a little money.
But the emotional loneliness, the weight of isolation, and the silence she maintained to avoid burdening her family slowly crushed her spirit.
The man from Facebook
By 2012, Melissa was emotionally exhausted. She needed someone to talk to - someone who would listen without judgement. So she went back to the platform that had once betrayed her: Facebook.
There she met a Kenyan man living in the US. He said he was a divorcee from Central Kenya, looking for love, companionship, and a future wife.
“I felt he was perfect: mature, understanding, and caring,” she says.
They talked daily on Imo. She felt alive again. Less lonely. She allowed herself to believe in love, in softness, in possibility.
“He made me feel seen,” she says.
Within two months, he sent her $100 (Sh12,925). He asked to be introduced to her parents and her child. She connected them. He called her parents often, winning their trust too.
Slowly, almost invisibly, he groomed her.
The day everything changed
“One day he video-called and asked me to take a shower while on video. For someone you love and trust, that didn’t feel like an issue,” she says.
She did it, believing it was intimacy, not exploitation.
“What I didn’t know was that he was recording me,” she says before her voice breaks. She composes herself, then the floodgates open.
That one incident became five years of virtual sexual slavery.
His calls came at any hour - midnight, 2 a.m., dawn. If she resisted his demands for explicit acts, he threatened to send the videos to her parents.
“That’s where he trapped me. I couldn’t bear the thought of my parents seeing that. They’d think I’d become a prostitute in Lebanon,” she says.
Missing his calls sparked a crisis. He would phone her parents, commanding them to tell her to call him back.
“When I finally called, he scolded me like a child. I froze. I listened. Then he ordered me to do whatever he wanted sexually.”
She complied, praying for a miracle to bring that “dream” to an end.
The day she was finally freed
In 2017, the ‘miracle’ came, but not the one she expected: he died.
She learnt from a social media post by his son that he had been married all along and lived with his wife.
“That day I cried,” she says. “Not for him. But for the part of me he had killed for five years.”
Melissa slipped into depression so deep she could barely recognise herself. She only began recovering in 2020, thanks to her sister’s selfless care and constant encouragement to leave the past behind.
Today, back in Kenya - she returned in 2015 with help from the consulate - she shares her story as a warning.
“I tell women: please, don’t fall into my trap. These men online will destroy you. If a man asks you to video-call while naked, run. You will regret it in ways you cannot imagine,” she warns.
*Melissa is a pseudonym used to safeguard her dignity and protect her from further harm.
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