Before dawn breaks over a village in Kurunegala or Batticaloa, a woman slips quietly out of her own front door and boards a bus that will take her to Colombo’s airport and from there, thousands of kilometres away — into someone else’s home. In the Gulf, behind polished gates and marble foyers, tens of thousands of Sri Lankan women live and work inside private households as domestic workers: cooking, cleaning, caring for children and elderly parents, washing clothes, polishing floors that are not their own. Their labour sustains families abroad and props up the Sri Lankan economy through remittances. But inside those homes, their lives are often defined by long hours, cultural shock, isolation, and a loneliness that rarely appears in official statistics.
Most of these women come from rural or semi-urban communities. Many are mothers. The decision to migrate is rarely romantic; it is pragmatic. School fees, medical bills, loans, unfinished houses with exposed brick — these are the push factors. Recruitment agents promise steady salaries in Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar or Oman. Pre-departure briefings describe contracts, duties, and rights. What they cannot truly convey is what it means to live inside an employer’s house, on call from before sunrise until long after the family has gone to bed.
Domestic work in private homes is fundamentally different from factory or construction labour. There are no co-workers to whisper to during a break, no dormitories full of compatriots, no visible public workplace. The house is both job site and confinement. For many Sri Lankan women, the first shock is spatial: doors that lock from the outside, CCTV cameras in corridors, a bedroom that doubles as storage space, or sometimes no private room at all. Even in better situations, privacy is minimal. A phone may be confiscated or its use restricted. Calls home are rationed to once a week, or less. Time off can be uncertain. In some cases, there are no rest days.
The emotional geography of migration unfolds slowly. The first weeks are disorienting. The language barrier is acute: Arabic commands delivered quickly, expectations conveyed through gesture and tone. The rhythm of daily life in conservative Gulf households can feel rigid and hierarchical. Employers may expect unquestioning obedience. Cultural misunderstandings are common — about food, dress, religious practice, or how children should be disciplined. A Sri Lankan woman used to chatting with neighbours across a garden fence suddenly finds herself silent for hours, moving from kitchen to laundry room to nursery without meaningful conversation.
Homesickness becomes physical. Women describe crying quietly while ironing clothes, or staring at a photograph of their children saved on a basic smartphone. Many have left behind young sons and daughters in the care of grandparents. Birthdays are missed. School performances go unseen. When a child falls sick back home, the mother may learn about it through a crackling phone call she cannot extend because the employer is waiting. Guilt and longing mix with determination: the salary must be earned; the sacrifice must count.
Working hours frequently stretch beyond what is written in contracts. A typical day can begin at 5am, preparing breakfast, and end past 11pm after cleaning the kitchen from a late family gathering. Domestic workers often serve multiple generations under one roof. There is rarely a clear boundary between “on duty” and “off duty.” The doorbell rings; guests arrive; more tea must be brewed. The baby cries at night; the nanny is summoned. Because the workplace is a private home, monitoring and enforcement of labour standards are difficult. Much depends on the character of the employer.
Some women do report kind households and respectful treatment. But others recount withheld wages, verbal humiliation, and confiscated passports. The most troubling stories involve physical violence or sexual advances by male members of the household. The imbalance of power is stark: a migrant woman, isolated in a foreign country, dependent on her employer for legal residency. Speaking out can mean dismissal, non-payment, or accusations of “absconding.” For those who flee abusive homes, embassies in Gulf capitals sometimes become temporary refuges, crowded shelters where women wait for paperwork and flights back to Sri Lanka.
Isolation is not only physical but social. Domestic workers in private homes often have limited opportunities to meet other Sri Lankans. On rare rest days, they may gather in church compounds or public parks, speaking Sinhala or Tamil with relief, sharing food from home, comparing experiences. These brief encounters become lifelines. They swap advice on how to negotiate for a weekly day off, how to request overdue salary, how to endure until the contract ends. The park bench becomes a confessional.
Invisibility defines much of their existence. The families they serve may rely entirely on their labour, yet the worker remains outside the emotional circle of the household. She witnesses intimate moments — arguments, celebrations, illnesses — without being truly seen. Her own inner life stays hidden. The remittances she sends home build concrete houses and finance education, but her daily reality is confined to someone else’s domestic sphere.
When contracts end and women return to Sri Lanka, the homecoming can be bittersweet. Children have grown taller. Accents have shifted. Some marriages have strained under years of separation. Neighbours may admire the new tiled roof without understanding the cost paid in missed childhoods and endured indignities. Many women leave again, signing another contract, because the economic pressures remain.
To focus on Sri Lankan domestic workers in the Gulf is to look beyond macroeconomic figures and policy debates and into kitchens and corridors. It is to recognise that migration is not only about wages and remittances, but about human endurance inside private walls. Behind every transfer of money to a rural bank branch stands a woman who has traded proximity to her own family for proximity to someone else’s. Her story is one of resilience, but also of profound solitude — a life lived in the shadowed spaces of other people’s homes.
I have sat on plastic chairs outside churches in the Gulf on a rare Friday afternoon and watched Sri Lankan women laugh like schoolgirls for exactly two hours before returning to houses where they are employees first and human beings second. If you want to understand migration, don’t start with remittance graphs. Start with that bench.
Sri Lankan domestic workers in the Gulf are described in economic language: “foreign exchange earners,” “low-skilled migration,” “housemaids.” Such tidy labels. They hide the fact that these are women who once stood in their own kitchens in Kurunegala or Jaffna and decided that loving their children sometimes means leaving them.
Inside private homes, everything becomes intimate and unequal at the same time. You are in someone’s bedroom changing sheets, someone’s bathroom scrubbing tiles, someone’s nursery rocking a child to sleep — but you are not allowed to belong. You witness family arguments, celebrations, illnesses. Yet your own loneliness must be silent. That is the emotional paradox of domestic work: proximity without inclusion.
The isolation is not dramatic like in a prison film. It is quieter. It is eating alone after serving dinner. It is waiting for permission to call your son. It is being “on duty” even when you are exhausted because the baby woke up again. It is the constant awareness that your legal status depends on the mood of one employer.
And yes, let’s speak plainly. When a woman works inside a private home, she is vulnerable. To shouting. To humiliation. To withheld wages. To unwanted touching disguised as familiarity. When abuse happens, it happens behind doors designed to protect family privacy. Privacy for whom? Certainly not for the worker.
But here is what I refuse to accept: the idea that these women are passive victims. I have seen their networks. The whispered advice exchanged in parks. The way they share SIM cards and survival tips. The way they send every spare dollar home to finish a roof or pay a daughter’s tuition. They are strategists of survival.
Still, resilience should not be romanticised. A country that depends on women exporting care while importing their remittances must confront the cost. We cannot celebrate the foreign exchange and ignore the emotional debt.
Behind every polished Gulf villa is a woman who misses her own front door. That absence is the real remittance — paid in years, in tears, in birthdays watched through a phone screen. And we owe her more than gratitude.