162 Between Private and Public
photographers from West Africa offer their services. Other churches cater
specifically to migrant domestic workers, such as the Ethiopian Orthodox
church in Badaro, while Pentecostals, a group toward which some
Ethiopian women seem to be turning, gather in a small church in Naba’a,
where a Lebanese pastor leads the service with simultaneous translation
into Amharic.
hurch-related NGOs, particularly active in Lebanon, also cater to C
domestic workers from particular national origins.^27 In Lebanon in 1997
the Pastoral Committee of Asian-African Migrants was formally estab-
lished under the direction of the Bishop of the Ecclesiastic Council of
Lebanon. They administer social, legal and religious assistance to migrant
workers, such as providing lawyers free of charge, and oversee a number
of Catholic centers that cater to the needs of African and Asian migrant
domestic workers. The Afro-Asian Migrant Center, which was started in
1987, has a particularly large constituency of Filipino workers, thanks to
the activism of a Filipina nun who is also in charge of a 30-minute radio
program in Tagalog on Sundays on the Voice of Charity station. Another
center, run by a Sri Lankan nun, has functioned as the main point of ref-
erence for Sri Lankan domestic workers since 1988, Christians as well
as Buddhists. In addition, Caritas-Lebanon, working on migrant work-
ers’ issues under the aegis of the European Community, had started its
own migrant center in 1994, providing assistance to refugees and female
migrant workers from Asia and Africa.^28 The presence of such NGOs
supporting the rights of migrant domestic workers blurs the boundar-
ies between being present in public space and participating in the pub-
lic sphere, for they do not only function as a subaltern public space for
migrant domestic workers but are also involved in public advocacy work.
Historical trajectories and shifting meanings of a female public
presence
To understand whether and how the presence of (migrant) domestic
workers in public space is new and what such public presence means,
we need to investigate the historical trajectories of non-kin domestic
labor. This does not only require an investigation into the predecessors of