Introduction

Zemzem is a young Ethiopian woman in her early twenties who had lived several years in the Middle East. When we met in a small cafe on Bole Road, she was dressed in a black abaya, her hair covered with a head scarf, and accompanied by her brother and his wife. Zemzem's young and timid appearance disguised her extensive life story, and when she began to talk, she hardly came to a halt. Born in a village in the south of Ethiopia, she grew up with an aunt in Addis Ababa because her parents were unable to provide for her. When she was sixteen years old, Zemzem migrated to Qatar to take up paid domestic work for an Indian family. When her employers went on pilgrimage to Mecca, she joined them but got lost at the Kaaba, between hundreds of thousands of pilgrims. She stayed in Saudi Arabia, had numerous jobs, and was deported during the large-scale deportation campaign of the Saudi government in 2013. When we interviewed her in August 2014, Zemzem was living with her brothers in Addis Ababa and desperately looking for a job. She would like to set up her own business, but if that did not work out, she was planning to migrate again.

Zemzem is one of the millions of Ethiopian women who have migrated as domestic workers to the Middle East in the past twenty years, and in doing so have become part of the Ethiopian diaspora. While labor migration was restricted under the socialist regime of Mengistu, freedom of movement has become a constitutional right under the government that came to power in 1991. Ethiopia has become one of the main “sending countries” of domestic workers to the oil-rich countries on the Arabian Peninsula and to Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt (see de Regt 2010; Fernandez 2010; 2020; Minaye 2012). In this chapter, I will use the experiences of young Ethiopian women who migrated to the Middle East to study issues of mobility and immobility. The public discourse in Ethiopia about women's migration to the Middle East emphasizes women's immobility; many spend their lives in the houses of their employers and face abuse and exploitation. Yet, a closer look at their life stories shows the many different instances of mobility and the moments in which they are able to exert some agency, albeit under restricted circumstances.