Mariaam Bhatti: Tales of a Domestic Worker
One of the conferences I’ve attended by pure chance was an event in Vilnius, Lithuania on financial integration for migrants, the result of a free short course I’d attended in Dublin about two months previously. I wasn’t expecting so much from the course, but after two weeks I walked away equipped to transfer the knowledge I’d accrued to other migrants who needed information on money matters. Most importantly, though, it marked my first trip to eastern Europe.
I knew it was crucial for domestic workers like me to have basic financial education, especially when they are in a foreign country where everything is new and accessing information can be a challenge due to many reasons, such as the language barrier or just not knowing who to ask or where to go for certain things.
I remembered how I had saved my salary under a mattress for months in my first job in Ireland, and how misinformed I was by my employer about bank accounts. I remember asking her about opening an account and the dirty look she had given me as she carelessly responded: “You need a lot of documents to open a bank account here, which you don’t have. What do you need a bank account for anyway?” So this came at the right time for the kind of people who most need such information.
I have heard many similar stories of domestic workers who were apparently given bank accounts by their employers to use to save their earnings. Few were lucky to get their savings back when they needed them, while others sadly walked out of their employer’s houses empty-handed when things came to a point where they had to part ways. Many more times such arrangements ended up in these savings withdrawn without the rightful owner’s permission, and when investigated there would be no proof of ‘stolen’ wages as technically the account would have been in their employer’s name.
But I digress. The course was a great initiative and an amazing tool for promoting integration and education in a nice and friendly way. Moreover, I thought it was well designed to break barriers between different cultures, as there were a lot of intercultural awareness games and sharing of ‘quick facts’ about each other’s countries. We also learned useful negotiation skills, and the need to push boundaries from time to time, a skill that even domestic workers need.
I still vividly remember one of the participants – a friendly, sweet woman from Uzbekistan, who always smiled and always volunteered to do given tasks, even at times when I thought the task was a bit hard to do and I would sit in the corner and hope no one would notice or ask me to do anything.
She could be easily understood despite having little English, with an interesting way of combining words with hand signs to construct understandable sentences. She was very creative and innovative in her own way. And she gave me so much hope that the world can be an amazing place to live in if we are optimistic about life and the future and everything else around us.
To be continued...
Mariaam Bhatti is a member of the Domestic Workers Action Group and Forced Labour Action Group of the Migrant Rights Centre Ireland.
