BEIRUT — There is almost nothing Raquel Barrion doesn’t know about the two Lebanese children she has looked after since they were babies. But one day, the Filipina domestic worker decided to find out how much they knew about her.
Barrion, 39, was pleasantly surprised when – by means of a light-hearted quiz game – one of them got her birthday right and both knew her favorite color as well as he best-loved food.
BEIRUT — There is almost nothing Raquel Barrion doesn’t know about the two Lebanese children she has looked after since they were babies. But one day, the Filipina domestic worker decided to find out how much they knew about her.
Barrion, 39, was pleasantly surprised when – by means of a light-hearted quiz game – one of them got her birthday right and both knew her favorite color as well as he best-loved food.
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Many families across the Middle East and beyond might struggle to answer such questions about the live-in workers who cook for them, clean, and care for their children.
The quiz game is one of many upbeat experiences recounted by Barrion on video sharing app TikTok as a way to tell the rarely heard stories of migrant domestic workers in Lebanon, where an economic crisis and COVID-19 have highlighted cases of abuse.
By posting daily videos, which have garnered more than 600,000 likes in a year, Barrion said she hoped to give a voice to Lebanon’s often-neglected domestic workers and a humanizing glimpse into their hidden lives.
“It’s a simple message, we’re domestic workers and work at home, but we’re also human. We need our freedom,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation, in a phone interview.