Dinah Haizel, 26, left the shores of Ghana in 2019 in search of what she felt would be greener pastures. Her ultimate goal? To secure enough money to fund her education at the tertiary level.

According to her, she had explored different employment avenues, while in Ghana, to make some money for the same purpose – but what she got from being an attendant at a store and serving as a mobile money operator were just a pittance and could not aid her to fulfil her heart’s desire.

Introduced by a friend to an agent who convinced her there were work opportunities that paid well in Lebanon, she decided to try her luck there.

Dinah paid a sum of $450 to facilitate her voyage. She had originally wanted to travel to Turkey or Germany but, owing to her inability to raise the requisite funds, she had to settle for Lebanon.

Dinah, thus, embarked on that journey into the unknown – to a foreign land in the hope of a better life. Her dreams, however, were shattered when she finally arrived at her destination and came face to face with the reality.

From being overworked to the point where she was getting very little sleep, constantly feeling dizzy and experiencing severe headaches to being physically abused, Dinah began to see beyond the fanciful ideas she had had before her voyage.

But she soldiered on. When it got to the point where she could no longer shoulder the burden of working non-stop as a babysitter, shop attendant, cleaner at home, among other things, she spoke to the agent in Ghana to change her employer. This was communicated to the agents in Lebanon.

This move infuriated the agents in Lebanon who took Dinah to their home and treated her to the beating of her life. After being threatened with death, she was sent to a second employer – again, as a domestic hand.

Dinah, unfortunately, realised she had only succeeded in moving from the frying pan and right into the fire. Her new employer gave her even more backbreaking work to do, something Dinah feels was her punishment for having protested against the workload at her former employer’s.

Matters came to a head when, after unbearable work at her new place of work and not being paid for months, Dinah told her employers she wanted to leave.

This incensed the family with which she was staying and, at a point, there was an attempt to lynch her. In order to escape or “die on her own [terms],” she jumped from the second storey of the building in which she was and passed out upon impacting the floor.

The left side of Dinah’s body was left paralysed. After months of suffering, she was finally “dumped” by her employers at the Ghanaian Embassy in Lebanon.

She was finally rescued and brought to Ghana, with the aid of the Ghanaian Mission there, together with some 2,261 others in August 2019.

Dinah has been traumatised and is still suffering the health effects of her crash-landing.