“Weekend-Families” of Migrant Domestic Workers in Lebanon

Abstract

Tripoli, Lebanon, June 2010: It is a typical Sunday afternoon at the Tripoli mall in North Lebanon. Most shops are closed, except for a few odd cafés where one can buy coffee and surf on the Internet. What is curious is the complete absence of Lebanese shoppers. All one can see are Filipino women, dressed up in their Sunday best. Some are smoking, others are sipping coffee and exchanging photographs of their children. All corners of the mall, the stairways and corridors are filled with laughter, smoke and conversation. This mall is the Filipino women’s usual hangout with their “weekend-families”. There is little activity in the streets outside the mall. The hot and sultry afternoon is time for most to take their afternoon siesta. But the story is somewhat different on the balconies above the street. Women — Black African women — are sweeping and banging dust out of carpets. Each one takes a pause between their cleaning, to lean over the railings and converse with other women on balconies of neighboring buildings. These balconies are their usual hangout with their “weekend-families”. These, what I have termed, weekend-families, forged by the women, are not consanguinal but based on shared occupation, a shared sense of isolation and sometimes, common nationality, ethnicity and place of residence. These families are very often temporal in nature; their structure is shaped by the mobility of the migrant workers, and their maintenance dependent on the sporadic meetings of the women over the weekends. Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, these familial ties are vital for the life and work of the migrant domestic workers.