On November 4, 2020, at 9:05 a.m., 24-year-old Mary* arrived in Nigeria. That Wednesday morning, on the journey back to her family who had rescued her, Mary was unsure of what lay ahead. When she got to the Lagos airport, the time was already 3:05 PM. Amidst the plethora of emotions expressed through consistent hugs, the words of her aunt stuck with her: “Thank you, This is Lebanon. My sister is back.” Mary left her parents, husband and her two kids in Ogun State, Nigeria to Lebanon in August 2019. Mary’s pastor had informed her about a $200-per-month domestic worker job in Lebanon. The pastor was made aware of the job by an Egyptian agent whom he knew. As of then, Mary was without a job and was eager to leave the country and live a better life in an assumed healthy atmosphere. Upon reaching Lebanon, her passport was seized by immigration officers. She had to wait in a room where she and about 80 other Nigerian girls who boarded the same plane with her were hidden. The other girls had also tendered their passports and waited for their employers. Mary had to wait for four hours before her employer, Nisrine Zawahra Daher, came to pick her up. The next year and a few months to come were going to be life-changing for Mary. She knew it but never imagined it to be wrecking. Mary believed Lebanon was a place like the UK and US she often heard about. She wanted an experience that wasn’t her home country, Nigeria. “The day I got to Lebanon, I was so happy. It was the first time I boarded a plane but once I had stayed there for a while, it was not easy,” she said. “It’s not because of the money. I just wanted to go and work. I didn’t even know that’s how it would be. I knew they always talked about the UK and USA as good places. I thought since it wasn’t Nigeria, maybe Lebanon would be okay too.” Mary endured terrible work conditions such as having to wake up early and work till late at night. Most times, she was unable to eat due to the workload. Whenever she got lucky, she was able to eat twice a day. Her typical daily life was without a proper place to sleep. She woke, worked and slept in the kitchen. She also went through physical abuse when she made her first attempt to leave for Nigeria. In 2020, Mary’s mother called to inform her about her father’s death. As the first child of her parents, tradition meant that she had to travel to Nigeria to observe a rite of passage only she would be able to undertake. Upon polite notice to Nisrine and her husband, they immediately objected, threatening to send her to jail or kill her. She was beaten that day and that led to the seizure of her phone. “If God said I’d not go back to Nigeria, it’s fine,” she said. “I had to accept fate and put myself in the hands of God because I was already tired. Those people can do and undo. I could not drag her since I had no family there. I had to wait and have faith.” Mary’s story is not uncommon for domestic workers who seek to work in an environment where their services are legalised. However, this has been tied to the debate on human rights and the view of labour migration laws. In the Middle East, there’s a system called Kafala which has by practice been made synonymous with slavery. Under the Kafala system, migrant domestic workers who are dominantly women and labourers from Africa and South Asia go to work under the trusteeship of an employer who pays for their upkeep and travel. This system is primarily in seven Arab countries among which Lebanon chiefly operates. Other countries include Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Oman, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. According to 2020 data from the United Nations International Children’s Education Fund (UNICEF), about 70.1 million people take up domestic work, however, due to obscurity in the sector, there may be about 100 million people taking up domestic services. Despite the sheer size of the informal sector, the rights of informal workers are not being protected. This is especially the case in the Global South where countries are unable to help the constant population of migrants seeking better employment and living conditions in other countries. Many of these workers have to travel illegally, encountering multiple perils during the journey or even arriving at unplanned destinations. Lebanon’s Kafala system has been rooted in the aftermath of the Lebanese Civil War of 1975 to 1990, which saw the exodus of about a million people. Prior, households were employers of young Lebanese girls who are trusted to work for a certain period while their salaries were collected by their families. To make up for the lost population, entries of domestic workers were made legal by the Ministry of Labour.