Price they pay for a job

The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class to clean it properly. If it smells, ‘‘Mama,’’ as the aspir...

The teacher held up an electric cake mixer and told the class to clean it properly. If it smells, ‘‘Mama,’’ as the aspiring maids were instructed to call their woman employers, ‘‘will be angry and she will hammer and beat you.’’

‘‘This is where you go wrong,’’ the teacher continued. ‘‘That is how Mama beats you and burns you — when you do anything wrong.’’

Eighteen women took down every word. Among them, Rangalle Lalitha Irangame was struggling to keep up, haggard after a sleepless night in the hospital. Her daughter was sick with fever, but a cause for panic for one about to leave for years abroad.

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After a year of thinking, 35-year-old Lalitha — who prefers that name — decided to trade her life as a Sri Lankan housewife for one as a West Asia-housemaid. After completing their 12-day training, she and her classmates would join a mass migration of women to the Persian Gulf.

Behind those high-walled homes of the Arab world the women risk exploitation so extreme that it sometimes approaches ‘‘slaverylike’’ conditions, according to a recent Human Rights Watch report on foreign workers in Saudi Arabia. But while attention has focused on the failure of countries like Saudi Arabia to prevent or prosecute abuses, the de facto complicity of the countries that send their women abroad has largely escaped scrutiny.

For developing countries, migration has become a safety valve, easing the pressure to employ the poor, according to a study by Devesh Kapur, an associate professor of government at Harvard.

More than a million Sri Lankans — roughly one in every 19 citizens — now work abroad, and nearly 6,00,000 are housemaids, according to government estimates. Migrant workers have become Sri Lanka’s largest earner of foreign exchange, out-doing all major agricultural crops. In Saudi Arabia, they call Lanka ‘‘the country of housemaids.’’

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Sri Lanka’s government has become an assiduous marketer of its own people. With training programs like Lalitha’s, it is helping to prepare what is by now a second generation of housemaids. It even provides a safe haven to shelter, hide and rehabilitate those women who return with broken bodies. But it does little to publicise those abuses for fear of jeopardising the millions they send home.

By one estimate, 15-20 pc of the 1,00,000 Lankan women who leave each year return prematurely, face abuse or nonpayment of salary. Many maids who run away are kept in limbo at Lanka’s embassies because no one wants to pay their way home. Hundreds have become pregnant, often after rapes, producing children who, until the Constitution was amended, were stateless. —NYT