In a live interview on Instagram, model, actress, and activist Naomi Campbell urged African women not to go to work in Lebanon if recruited.
Her pleads come upon reading a report by Al-Jazeera, investigating the death of a Ghanaian domestic worker named Faustina Tay.
According to the report, Tay’s body was found dead in a parking lot under her employer’s building (Campbell mistakenly believed that Tay’s body was found dead in a car). Nevertheless, Tay’s death was tragic.
While local authorities and a forensic expert deemed her death a suicide from falling off the building, Tay’s WhatsApp voice messages say otherwise.
Tay had been in contact with her brother and a Canadian-Lebanese activist group chat prior to her death. She shared that she had suffered abuse several times and expressed fears that she will die at the hands of her employer.
Whether one would believe that her death was self-inflicted or not, the conditions that she was living in that could have driven her to take her own life must have been inhumane.
To Twitter, Campbell writes, “This must stop. Rest in peace, sister Faustina Tay.”
She is one of many domestic workers who have had similar tragic fates. The death of Tay was a misfortune and a warning signal to all African workers wishing to find opportunities in the Middle East.
