Throughout her stay, Faustina alleged that she was physically and sexually assaulted by Dia family members and staff at Ali Kamal’s recruitment agency. But despite this, her desire to live and return home never diminished from the first incident of Mona Nasrallah’s withholding of her money, to the very end, a mere two days before her death when two grown men allegedly held her down and savagely beat her at the employment agency. In forty minutes of audio recordings and hundreds of text messages exchanged with This is Lebanon, Faustina exhibited an uncompromising determination to escape the hell that was the Dia home. Not once did she indicate a desire to end it all; her sole thoughts were of getting home safely.





From within, she managed to mount a covert resistance. Learning that in This is Lebanon she had an ally, she cooperated and passed on vital information about her location, her employers and the employment agency complicit in putting her through hell. Despite being imprisoned in the home and thus being unfamiliar with the neighbourhood, she had a quick-witted ability to identify landmarks and building structures in her neighbourhood. This seemed to clearly indicate her desire to escape. She identified a petrol station, a nearby gym (The Tiger Gym) and a pharmacy and sent us pics and a location pin.





It was Faustina who was able to identify the location and social media pages of the Dia family business - a mens’ sportswear shop on the Beir Al Abed intersection in the southern suburbs called ‘Dia Fashion’. She sent screenshots from Google Maps identifying these and other markers. It was with the sincere belief that she would either be given assistance on where to go if she were to escape, or if we were to arrange a rescue.





As desperate as we were to see Faustina freed, it wasn’t plausible to plot what in the eyes of many would have been deemed a raid. Assisting a domestic worker to escape is a crime in Lebanon and there are CCTV cameras on every street in Dahiya. Our first principle is to do no harm. If we had contacted Hussein Dia before knowing who the Lebanese agent was, we could have placed her in further danger (we only learned the name of the agency after her death). She could have been taken back to the agent, who we already knew to be brutal, and we would have had no way of knowing where she was. We planned to contact the employers once we knew the agent’s details. We knew Faustina was fearful but she was not suicidal. She was aware we were planning to help, and she seemed to have hope.