DAMMAM – Owners of recruitment offices allege that housemaids who are HIV-carriers often pay bribes to recruitment offices in their countries to circumvent requirements of medical checkups to process their visas before travelling to the Kingdom. Although Saudi families are reluctant to recruit domestic servants from African countries where HIV/AIDS cases are rampant, they found themselves compelled to do so in light of ongoing bans on recruitment from some Asian countries. A Saudi woman from Qatif, who preferred anonymity, said she recruited an Ethiopian housemaid. She was happy when the maid arrived after a wait of seven months for the paperwork to be completed. She took the maid for a medical checkup to process her iqama a month after the woman's arrival in the Kingdom. The results were shocking: The Ethiopian maid was HIV-positive. The Saudi woman locked her housemaid in a room to prevent other members of the family from contracting the virus. She then forced her husband and children to take AIDS tests. Newspapers carried a story about a citizen who did a medical checkup for his housemaid at King Fahd Hospital in Al-Ahsa and turned up nothing. The result was OK. But a month later, the housemaid started to suffer from cold and persistent cough that did not respond to medicaments. Then rashes appeared on her body. He took her again to the hospital and the family discovered that the maid had AIDS. Reports on social networking sites cite several incidents of housemaids running away after their sponsors discovered that they were HIV positive. Al-Sharq newspaper met representatives of some recruitment offices to shed light on the problem. One owner said housemaids pay bribes to recruitment offices back home to tamper with medical reports. Another owner said he had never encountered a case where a housemaid brought over from Ethiopia had AIDS. He said he had confidence in the recruitment office he deals with in Ethiopia. There were cases of housemaids with diabetes and other chronic conditions arriving in the Kingdom, but not AIDS, said another recruitment agent. Dr. Ahmad Kanan, head of contagious diseases at the Health Affairs in the Eastern Province, said foreign workers who were tested for diseases in their countries of origin should repeat the tests in the Kingdom to ensure that they are healthy and don't carry contagious diseases. He urged citizens to hold medical tests for their workers as soon as they arrive in the Kingdom. – SG
