Moroccan Woman Escapes Modern Slavery in France, Rebuilds Life Through Theater

After working as a "little maid" in a Moroccan family in her country, Donia, who has never set foot in school, is spotted in a hair salon by a woman who asks her to look after her young children, reports the newspaper l’Humanité.

A few times later, her new employer offers to follow her to Paris where the family was going to settle. Hesitant at first, she will be convinced by her employer who promises her a monthly salary of 300 euros and the coverage of all the expenses for her arrival in France. Better, she could treat a slight disability that bothered her, she had been promised.

Arrived in Paris, Donia will be overwhelmed by her new way of life. She had to face a huge workload and a total lack of privacy. In reality, the living conditions of the couple she was working for were appalling.

"The parents and their two children live in a studio, in the 5th arrondissement. The couple slept on a sofa bed, the two children in a double bed next to them. And me, on a cardboard in the middle. I remain traumatized by this lack of privacy," describes the young woman who has to take care of the children, but also prepare meals and do the housework.

The first month, Donia receives 100 euros, as a salary, then after three months, nothing. The couple claim to send her money directly to her family in Morocco. What her life as a slave deprived of everything does not allow her to verify. Later, when the couple opens a shisha bar on the ground floor of their home, Dounia has to work there until closing, without complaining, despite all the fatigue she felt after 17 to 18 hours of work per day.

In the bar, she worked with another girl that the couple had brought in. After the bar closed, the two of them were "locked in a windowless cubbyhole at the back of the establishment, where they slept, locked in," she recounts.

It is notably thanks to her unfortunate companion who has access to social networks that Donia manages to contact a compatriot. "His French wife talked a lot to me, she told me I had to learn French and found me courses at the Maison des Femmes de Montreuil," says the young woman who will be picked up by this couple.

Donia, who still keeps the memory of those years of misery spent with the Franco-Moroccan couple of merchants, was able to settle her health problem and works as a chambermaid in a hotel.

To overcome her deep trauma, she tries to exist at the Maison des Femmes de Montreuil where she takes French lessons and participates in the theater workshop. "On stage, I exist, I see myself as a star," she confides, all joyful!