Alice Awor Tindo had only been working in Saudi Arabia for three months when friends and relatives back home in Kenya began receiving distressed calls and WhatsApp messages.
The 30-year-old domestic worker told them her employer had confiscated her passport and refused to pay her. She had been banned from having a phone, so had to hide hers, and wanted to switch to a different household.
“I am not in a good condition,” the single mother wrote in a message in the Kikuyu language, dated June 9, 2020, shown to the Thomson Reuters Foundation by her family.
“I told my employer that I want to change jobs, but she told me that I will only leave this place when I am dead.”
Four days later, Tindo’s body was found lying in her bedroom by her employer in Saudi’s Najran province.
A Saudi police report given to her family concluded that she had died in her sleep, the cause declared as “normal death”.
But her father, John Awor Tindo, disputes this.
“Alice was a healthy young woman,” said the 56-year-old farmer, standing by his daughter’s unmarked grave on a hillside cemetery near their home in the western town of Elburgon.
“It’s very mysterious. No one can just die in their sleep like that for no reason. There must be a cause. There should have been some follow-up.”
The Tindo family are among a growing number of bereaved Kenyan families sounding the alarm over the sudden deaths of female relatives working in Saudi Arabia.
Over the last two years, 89 Kenyans – more than half of them female domestic workers – have died in the Gulf nation, according to Kenya’s foreign ministry. In 2019, just three deaths were recorded.
The cause of death is mainly given as cardiac arrest, natural death or suicide. But many families are unconvinced, and rights groups think the deaths may be linked to a surge in abuse against domestic workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.
