Fatima Samuella Tholley’s dreams of going back to her native Sierra Leone to escape the escalating violence were dashed when an Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon killed her boss and very much destroyed everything she owned.

The 27-year-old cleaner told AFP that she and her cousin took an ambulance to Beirut’s capital after packing a change of clothes into a plastic bag.

Aside from the airport, where they had landed months before, the pair was unfamiliar with the mayhem of the bombed city, leaving them both afraid and perplexed.

“Only God knows, we don’t know if we will live or die today,” Fatima sobbed as she spoke to AFP during a video chat.

“I am without anything… no papers, no passport,” she exclaimed.

Claiming to have been granted shelter by a man they met during their travels, the cousins have been living in the small storage room of an abandoned flat for several days.

They could only watch from their window as strikes pummelling the city, unable to communicate in French or Arabic and without access to TV news.

Since mid-September, Lebanon has experienced a surge in violence that has claimed over 1,000 lives and displaced hundreds of thousands more as Israel continues to attack Hezbollah positions throughout the nation.

The legal status of migrant workers in the country is frequently linked to their employer due to the “kafala” sponsorship system that governs foreign labour, making their situation extremely unstable.

Rights organisations claim that the system permits a number of violations, such as the withholding of salaries and the seizure of official documents, which give employees their sole means of escape from the nation.

When we came here, our madams received our passports, they seized everything until we finished our contract” said 29-year-old Mariatu Musa
Tholley, who also works as a housekeeper.

“Now [the bombing] burned everything, even our madams… only we survived”.

– ‘They left me’ –

Sierra Leone is working to establish how many of its citizens are currently in Lebanon, with the aim of providing emergency travel certificates to those without passports, Kai S. Brima from the foreign affairs ministry told AFP

The impoverished nation in west Africa is home to a sizable Lebanese population that has been there for more than a century and is actively involved in trade and business.

Every year, a large number of migrants go to Lebanon with the intention of sending money home to support their families.

Mariatu remarked, “We don’t know anything, any information.”

She sobbed, saying, “[Our neighbours] don’t open the door for us because they know we are black.”

“We wish not to pass away here.”