How Kenyan women end up slaughtering ‘fat snakes’ in Saudi Arabia

The recruiting agents who keep changing their offices in the city have been employing the services of equally crooked brokers who scout for vulnerable women in the villages and towns, mostly in and around Kiambu and Mombasa.

It is these unsuspecting and desperate women who are ‘delivered’ to agents who promise them the ‘milk and honey’ of employment in Saudi Arabia.

The agents then quickly arrange for travel documents and swear them into secrecy not to divulge information on the ‘business.’ The confidence of the most desperate ones is further earned by ‘advance’ payments.

Within two weeks, the recruits would be at the airport ready to fly out.

Most of them don’t even know they are headed to Saudi Arabia until they are airborne or on landing at King Fahd Airport in Dammam, from where they are bussed over 1,200 kilometres to a desolate desert town in the north of the country.

During recruitment, the women are made to believe that they would be working for royal families in Riyadh, Qatar or Lebanon. But this is never the case, and it is always too late for them by the time they are ambushed with contracts at the Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

Once they get employment with the Arabs in the far flung towns, their passports and mobile phones are confiscated, all their clothes are burnt and they are given maternity-like long dresses, multiple sources have revealed.

They end up being tortured, denied food and there have even been cases of some being killed, with their bodies allegedly being thrown into gutters or buried in shallow graves. Those who manage to get back home are the few and lucky ones.

–sde.co.ke