Archive for December 23rd, 2010

Detail from stained glass Nativity scene, from a church in Cheshire, North West England

We’d like to extend warm Season’s greetings to each and every one of our thousands of readers, who now hail from every corner of the globe.

The site is heading towards its second birthday (next March) – and we have been astounded by the growth in readership and community here. We’re looking forward to building on this even more in 2011.

We’ll not be quite as prolific as usual over the festive period, but there should be one or two articles and we’ll be alerting you to any major stories or developments – we hope you’ll bear with us.

For those celebrating Christmas we hope that you, like us, also keep in your thoughts those Christians that are being persecuted around the world.

A very happy Christmas and our best wishes for a peaceful, healthy and prosperous New Year, to all of you.

Risky business: would-be maids from Indonesia waiting to be photographed for ID cards

Despite constant efforts to cover it up – media spin in both Saudi Arabia and Indonesia reassuring would-be domestic workers that everything is OK – it clearly isn’t. More degenerate violence from psychotic Saudi ‘sponsors’:

MAKKAH: A 29-year-old Indonesian maid is currently in intensive care after jumping from the third floor of a building while trying to run away from her sponsor’s home in the Al-Kakiya district of Makkah.

The woman is thought to have fractured some bones and suffered internal bleeding. According to police, the maid had been with her sponsor for three months and was trying to escape to work illegally elsewhere.

Such incidents are usually accompanied by swift reassurances that these are Isolated Incidents™. But in reality they are rife. In just one year alone in the past decade, at least 2,800 Sri Lankan housemaids ran away from their Saudi sponsors, claiming they had been overworked, sexually abused or physically mistreated by jealous wives.

They are among the countless foreign ‘guest workers’ in Saudi Arabia, many of whom who endure conditions that are cannot be described as anything other than modern-day slavery.

[Source: Arab News]