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SRI LANKAN SPEAKS ABOUT HER LIFE AS A SLAVE IN LEBANON
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By Mary Kate Brennan
Published: Friday, October 28, 2005 |
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Beatrice Fernando, a Sri Lankan woman, left her home hoping to find good work and opportunity in Lebanon. Instead, she endured an ordeal of virtually slavery. |
"Wake up, it's time to wake up," Beatrice Fernando begged the audience before her. Fernando, a diminutive Sri Lankan woman, came to Holy Cross this past Tuesday to give a lecture on the atrocities of modern day slavery entitled "Life of a Slave." Fernando having once been enslaved herself, focused upon her own experiences for the lecture.
From the beginning of the talk, Fernando clearly demonstrated that she is still deeply affected by the traumas she endured in Lebanon. She stumbled over words and repeatedly apologized for her difficulties in speaking as she choked with emotion.
Fernando is a native of Sri Lanka. As a single mother at the age of 23, she searched for a better paying job so that she might be able to afford a better life for her young child. In order to not disgrace her family, she did not take the position of a housemaid in her home country; rather, she discovered an agency that offered the promise of jobs with good pay. So, Fernando left her child in the care of her parents in Sri Lanka and went to Lebanon with the agency....
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