With roughly 400 stranded Sri Lankan women sleeping in his offices as they look for ways to escape Lebanon, Amanul Farouque, the country's ambassador, was out on Sunday morning, going from bakery to bakery to buy them bread.
"This is an unusual assignment, but we are in an unusual situation," he said wryly.
As Britain completed the evacuation of its citizens from Beirut on Sunday, along with most of the other Western states, the plight of smaller nations and their low-paid Lebanon-based citizens is getting worse. Up to 80,000 Sri Lankan women used to work as maids and cleaners in middle-class homes and hotels in Beirut and other Lebanese cities. At least 5,000 have applied to leave, and if the bombing gets worse, the numbers may rise.
They were the largest Asian community in Lebanon, so much so that a new word has appeared in Arabic: a sirlanka now means a maid.
Some were summarily sacked when their employers locked up their homes in panic and fled the country last week. Abandoned and penniless, they wander the streets in anxious little groups wondering what to do. Others line up at the embassy for papers to get out.
Some were frightened by the nightly bombs and asked to go back to Sri Lanka, even though their employers said they wanted them to stay.
Many were living in Lebanon illegally, either because they remained after their original contracts expired or after escaping from abusive employers who still hold their passports. They risk imprisonment if they try to get an exit visa at security headquarters.
"I wanted to leave Lebanon a long time ago," said Umani Senaviratna, 25, from Colombo as she stood in a crowded office in the embassy where every corridor is cluttered with suitcases.
The officially recommended monthly wage is US$130, but "I had to work for two households from 5:30am until 10pm and they gave me only US$100," she said.
"Then the war came, and it terrified me. I cried and cried and told my employer `I won't eat until you give me my passport.' I got it this morning and left," she said.
Until six months ago Sharma Nimali, 23, from the resort town of Ambulangoda on Sri Lanka's southwest coast, was working in Junieh, a mainly Christian town and holiday place just north of Beirut. She also found herself working for two households -- her initial employer and the employer's married daughter. She escaped and got a job with two other Sri Lankan women fugitives as part-time cleaners and concierges in a Beirut office block, where they take turns sleeping in a room under the stairs.
Amid the crowds of Sri Lankan women at the embassy on Sunday were employers who had brought their maids to help them. Randina Awali, 24, who works for the Red Cross, had driven with her father from Adloun on Lebanon's heavily bombed south coast. It took them four hours to cover the 64km to Beirut, but they were planning to go back after delivering their maid to the embassy.
"Her family were ringing day and night in tears and pleading with her to come home immediately," she said.
The six-story embassy, with its offices and flats for a handful of staff, always had a "safe house," a sparsely furnished flat for runaways from sexual and other employer abuse. Now the building is a refugee camp.
The fax machine clatters endlessly as families in Sri Lanka send photocopies of birth certificates and IDs for the scores of women who have no papers.
"This is not the time to check for fraud. We have to give them laisser-passers and put their names on manifests," the over-burdened ambassador said.
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