Visit to real Hell

Adlieh Detention Center: 3 floors underground.

We wait in a line of about 15 people, mostly men, Syrian, Egyptian and Sri Lankans, for about 30 minutes, as a guard records our names and ID card information. “We” are five women, three Ethiopian and two American. We are here to visit Tizita, an Ethiopian migrant domestic worker. Here is all I know of her story: as a result of months of working next to a very loud generator, she lost hearing in one ear. There must be more to the story. Worried about her hearing she escaped her employer, who had taken her passport from her on arrival (and apparently was unconcerned about her health), and sought medical care at the Ethiopian Embassy. The Embassy, seeing that she was under contract to the employer and had left, turned her in to the police, who brought her to the Detention Center. One of the people in our group had spent five years here herself! We marvel at her courage, both for staying in Lebanon after her release, and for returning to Adlieh in support of a countrywoman.

People in line have brought large bags with water, tissues, telephone cards, biscuits, gum. Some Lebanese citizens arrive and pass to the front of the line. As Americans we could do the same, but choose to remain, wanting the full experience on our first visit here, and not wanting to make other people wait longer.

Sandra calls it Modern Day Slavery. The “Mister” and the “Madame” act as owners, and the maids have no rights. There are more than 100 migrant domestic workers in this detention center, 120 in two other prisons, and an unknown number in three more. Undergound shelters house others without the means to go home.

The guard who checks our bags has a heart, treats people as human. This is notable. This place is right on a main road, on a traffic circle, just blocks from the national museum, but off the grid, out of the daylight.

Visitors are allowed in two days a week. 15 of us are allowed in at a time, for about 10 minutes. We go down just one floor. Those lucky prisoners we have come to visit ascend to meet us. They file in and peer through the metal mesh, cupping their hands around their eyes to try to find familiar faces. It is hard to see; the holes are 1/8” and a piece of its metal frame is right at eye level.
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Our lady, Tizita, arrives. She thanks us strangers who have come at the request of her scared and worried friends, talks to them, cries, and at the end accepts the things they have brought through the square foot door in the metal grid wall.

Goodbye Tizita. Will you be here 5 years too? In order to leave she needs a plane ticket, which, amazingly, she has, she needs $300 to pay her employer, who is suing her for breach of contract, and $200 more for the employment agency. And someone to run all the paperwork through the bureaucracy. Sandra promises to call the one NGO that formally helps these women, but three days later no one has returned her calls.