Kenyan Woman Narrates Her Eight Months of Hell in Iraq

A Kenyan woman who recently returned to the country after going through hell in the Middle East has narrated the suffering she went through in the hands of her cruel employer.

Lucia Nekesa, a mother of three, left Kenya for Iraq eight months ago after securing a well-paying house help job which she thought would have helped her raise her children and end her family’s poverty.

The contract she had signed with a recruitment agency in Kenya showed that she would work in Qatar but was shocked to learn she would be taken to Iraq after a change was made without her knowledge. 

Lucia could not hold her tears on Tuesday as she narrated the suffering her Arabic employer put her through for eight months. Speaking to the media at Haki Africa offices in Mombasa, Lucia recalled how she was assaulted in Iraq over false accusations.

“I was overworked in Iraq. I could not bear it,” she said.

When she informed her employer of her intention to quit, she was taken to the agent’s office headed by a woman named Rahab. Lucia said she was beaten and locked in a small bathroom for three days without food or drink. 

While locked up, Rahab deleted all her contacts in an attempt to cut her communication with anyone. “They delete all contacts to cut [your] communication with anyone close to you,” she explained.

She was later moved from the bathroom to a room on the highest floor that absorbed the scorching heat. She spent the next four days there before she was ordered to clean the whole block.

“I started with upstairs rooms, toilets, downstairs and cars. When I finished the agent ridiculed me.”
Later, Nekesa was given two options. The first one was to return to Kenya but she had to refund all the money her boss used to facilitate her travel to Iraq on top of Sh600,000 used to ‘buy’ her from the agency. The second option was to continue to work. She chose the latter.

“It was very hard for the boss to let me go because he had paid a lot of money for me. So they always took me back to the agency for exchange but all I got was punishment for not being able to work.”

She also revealed that one of the people who tortured her was a Tanzanian named John, who lied to her he was a Kenyan. 

When she asked him why he tortured fellow Africans, he said: “Mimi hata niambiwe nikuuwe nitakuuwa. Nitafanya vile nimeambiwa” (If I am asked to kill, I will kill you. I will do whatever I am asked to do.)

Nekesa, who was ailing at the time, managed to escape with the help of an African woman. This happened after her employer left the house one evening.

“I went straight to the airport but when I explained my tribulations to the officials, they said they could not help me and called the police.”

The officers questioned her and she provided the contacts of the woman who had helped her escape. From the information given by the woman, the officers called Nekesa’s boss to come to the airport.

“My boss told me that she would give me money to go back home the following day but when we got out, I saw the men from the agency waiting outside.”

She was taken back to the agency where she was beaten up with her employer accusing her of stealing her money.

 “I don’t know where my boss got the money she produced as evidence of my alleged theft.”
She was then sold like a slave to another agency. Nekesa said agents in Iraq swindled her out of her salary amounting to more than Sh600,000 while she was preparing to fly back to Kenya.

She divulged that there are many Kenyans who are sexually abused and even tried in Gulf kangaroo courts. Nekesa said she knows two of them who are languishing in a prison in Iraq.

Nekesa was rescued after interventions by Kenya’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Haki Africa, a human rights organization.