‘Thrown out like used washing machines’: Lebanon’s migrant workers bear brunt of displacement crisis

Women from Sierra Leone use a flashlight to eat by at a shelter for displaced migrant workers in Hazmieh, Lebanon. Photograph: Emilie Madi/Reuters

For the past 10 days, Farah Salka and her team of staff and volunteers at a Lebanese anti-racism organisation have answered thousands of desperate messages from women who have nowhere to hide from the bombs. Before the start of the Israeli airstrikes, Salka’s job as head of Lebanon’s Anti-Racism Movement (Arm) involved advocating and campaigning for the rights of Lebanon’s 400,000 migrant workers.

Now, she and her team have become frontline workers, struggling to find shelter and protection for overseas domestic workers from countries such as Ethiopia and Sierra Leone, who have found themselves abandoned by their Lebanese employers and with no way of getting home.