Thread by @awatiibadan

A W A Y F R O M H O M E
________________________

(6/7)

I had spent two years in Saudi Arabia and I had nothing to show for it. I came to the country to work and earn some money but there I was in the airport with nothing. I called the big sister.

She told me to use my remaining money to buy a train ticket from Saudi Arabia to Dubai.

The big sister met me at the train station and welcomed me. She was the one who connected me with a family in Dubai where I worked for a year.

The purpose was so as to, at least,

earn some money that I could come back home with. In this family, the work was still much but there was ease too – I had a measure of freedom, I could use my phone with no hassles and I was paid my salaries.

The sister however warned me that when I was ready to leave I should

not make it look like I am leaving finally, I should give my boss in Dubai the impression that I’d be away for a short visit home and that I’d be back.

I was in Dubai when a friend reached out to inform me that she wanted to travel to the Arab countries for work. I felt her

condition back at home was better than mine – I was earning less than N10,000 before I traveled.

She told me someone told her she could get a better life in Libya and that she wouldn’t need a passport, that she’d get a passport when she got to Libya.

I warned her to not get involved because it was not possible to travel without a passport and if they were claiming that she wouldn’t need a passport then they’d be traveling through the desert.

I sent her a video I had on my phone of people traveling through the desert

and how many had died on that route.

She dropped the idea of Libya and then began to talk about Dubai or Saudi. She said she had been promised that she’d earn N150,000 per month and work for only 12hours with breaks in between.

When I saw that she was still hellbent on

traveling, I knew that whatever I had to say wouldn’t matter.

You know, in matters like this, there’s only so much you can say. If I spoke too fiercely against them, people would interpret it like I was enjoying something and I didn’t want her to come over and enjoy too.

So, I kept quiet. When she asked me to link her with my agent, I declined because I wouldn’t be a party to her coming over and experiencing the hell I had gone through. We never spoke again for a while.

One day I received a call from my friend’s mom; she was crying that

she hadn’t been able to reach my friend for a while – that where she was working, they didn’t allow her to use a phone and that she hadn’t called home in a while like she used to.

She told me that ever since her daughter got to Dubai, her boss would beat her, rough her up and,

sometimes, even chain her. The mother began to cry unconsolably and she begged me to help her.

I told her that – to start with - I didn’t know my friend eventually traveled because I had advised her not to. I calmed her down and told her I’d see what I could do.

I asked the woman how she got my number and then she explained that her daughter’s boss always allowed her to call only one number a week. The last time she called, she told her mom to call a mutual friend of ours – it was that mutual friend that then gave the woman my Dubai

Dubai number. I asked the woman to give me the number she always called with from Dubai but the mother said the number was not a foreign number – it was a Glo number.

I then told my friend’s mother that the next time she called, she should tell her to call me directly when next

she had her phone privilege. If I could help, I’d need to speak with her to get vital details.

I kept waiting to get a call from both my friend or her mother but nothing came through. I got really weary and so I decided to call one of my siblings on WhatsApp and that she

should take the phone to my friend’s mother. The mother broke into tears again and said she hadn’t heard from the girl since the last time we last spoke too.

For anyone to be able to help the mother, at that point, we needed to know the girl’s location first and

then every other detail but at that point we knew nothing. So went had to just wait.

One day, after I was done working & I got reunited with my phone, I saw that I had received a ton of calls from a particular number. I called the number back and it was an Arab man who picked."

❤

(7/7 runs Monday night, 8:30pm)