“At first, the woman told the three of us, that we were going to work in Qatar. After she took us to the agent in Nairobi and we got the passports and visas, she said the destination had changed to Saudi Arabia,” said Ms Wairimu.
When she had had enough of it and duly informed her employers that she could not finish the two-year contract and wanted to go back home, they demanded the last salary she had been paid.
It was probably a detention centre and she met about 10 other Kenyans there. She recalls being injected with something and ending up in hospital. It is in this facility that she probably suffered the experiences now haunting her.
A family in the same village is still in mourning. They had gone to the airport to meet their returning daughter but were told she was pulled off the plane at the last minute and taken to hospital. She died three days later.
A week after she escaped the clutches of the cruel life for a black, Christian house help in Saudi Arabia last June, Ms Salome Wairimu nearly went crazy.
She would speak incomprehensibly, scream, shout, tear down the sheets of newspapers pasted on the walls of her widowed mother’s house and cause a ruckus so bad that it drew the whole village to their home in Miumia in Githunguri, Kiambu County.
