Credit...Vanessa Saba

Many single moms and their children are trapped there. She was adamant that her daughter wouldn’t be among them.

Abdi Latif Dahir and Vivian Nereim

Abdi Latif Dahir and Vivian Nereim spent months documenting the struggles of Kenyan mothers and children who are trapped in Saudi Arabia.

• Dec. 11, 2025

The first contraction came sharp and sudden, curling through Edith Ingasiani’s body as the sun peeked over Saudi Arabia’s capital, Riyadh.

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She had kept her pregnancy a secret, hiding her growing belly beneath loose and lengthy robes as she scrubbed floors and folded laundry for a middle-class family. In this oil-rich kingdom, an unmarried woman risked jail if discovered pregnant.

Her friends had urged her to get an illegal abortion. But this child, unexpected as it was, was her last link to the man she had loved.

Edith did not see a doctor. Hospitals, if they agreed to treat unmarried mothers, sometimes turned them over to the police. So she labored for hours on her thin mattress, accompanied by a midwife.

Finally, just after midday on Jan. 20, 2016 — soon after her 42nd birthday — she gave birth to a girl.

This was her third child. The first two, with her ex-husband, were growing up in Kenya. She had left them with her parents when she joined thousands of Kenyan women working in the Arabian Peninsula. These women sent money home, propping up families and the economy. They also endured unpaid wages, beatings and exploitation.

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Edith Ingasiani.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

For them, a baby born out of wedlock can mean an even crueler fate. Their children are often born without birth certificates, leaving them shunted to the fringes of society. Without identification documents, they are also not permitted to travel. Their mothers cannot take them home.

Edith had considered many names for her daughter. Patience. Faith. Grace. But as she held her tightly that afternoon, she whispered: “We are far from home. I want you to be a blessing.”

She named her Blessings.

Her plan had been to return home with enough saved for a modest life. She would buy some land and build a house in western Kenya, where tea farms unfurl over hillsides and corn grows tall. Unlike in the deserts of Saudi Arabia, the rain there falls in rhythms that never quite stop.

With her baby’s arrival, this was no longer a plan. It was a promise.

“Home is always the answer,” she said.

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Credit...Vanessa Saba

Taking a Chance

Even in the face of poverty, it takes a certain personality to leave everything behind and head to a country where stories of rape, assault and killing of foreign housekeepers are rampant. Kenyan villages have sent some of their most enterprising women to Saudi Arabia.

Women like Edith.

It was 2011 and she had left her husband, whom she said had beaten her. With few jobs available in her village, she set out alone for Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, and found work at a nursery school. Still, she struggled to cover her children’s school fees and faced pressure to provide for her parents.

A friend introduced her to a woman who was recruiting for overseas jobs. Edith said she was promised a job teaching in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates.

She was part of an early wave of Kenyans who were recruited to the Gulf. Today, sending workers abroad is a national policy. Remittances contribute more to Kenya’s economy than coffee and tea, its most famous commodities.

Edith left without telling her parents or children, afraid that they would stop her.

She boarded a plane believing that she was headed to Dubai. But she landed in Riyadh — the kind of deception that is the hallmark of human trafficking. In Saudi Arabia, she was assigned to work as a live-in housekeeper for a boss who refused to pay her.

The Saudi employment agency that placed her there had seized her passport, a common tactic that makes it harder for workers to quit. The agency, it turned out, had been unregistered. When the police shut it down, Edith lost all of her documents.

At the Kenyan Embassy in Riyadh, an official said that her only option was to keep working, without paperwork, and save up for a plane ticket.

The illegal market for Kenyan maids in Riyadh is booming and no secret. Edith found that freelance work had its advantages. She received better pay and was not confined to one family. She showed up, did the job and left.

Hanging out at a friend’s apartment one night in 2014, she met Hudu Iddrisu, a Ghanaian truck driver. Edith was drawn to his kindness, quiet demeanor and protective nature — everything, she said, that her former husband was not.

Soon, they were sharing his three-bedroom apartment in southern Riyadh. They went on dates at the park. She cooked him vegetables with ugali, the cornmeal dish that is an East African staple. He regaled her with stories of working in the busy Ghanaian trading city of Kumasi. She marveled at how easily they connected despite such different upbringings.

As their romance blossomed, they discussed marriage.

Then, in June 2015, she got a phone call. Hudu had been killed in a car accident.

Not long after, she took a pregnancy test.

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Credit...Vanessa Saba

Life in Saudi Arabia

Parents are supposed to register home births with the local authorities. But even if they do, the Saudi government offers no public pathway for unmarried mothers to obtain birth certificates for their children. Children are ascribed to fathers.

And reporting yourself as having had sex outside marriage is risky.

So Edith, like many other single mothers, did not.

Besides, she figured, Blessings was not staying long. Another Kenyan woman agreed to pose as the mother and take her home for $200. Blessings could grow up alongside her siblings, with Edith supporting them from afar.

But she worried about entrusting her baby to someone for a trip to a village 170 miles beyond Nairobi.

Her mother, Ettah Luvihi, in a phone call from Kenya, vetoed the idea. She recalled a dream about a stranger disappearing with Blessings. They were practicing Protestants but retained some of rural Kenya’s folk beliefs. The dream seemed like a warning.

“Just stay,” Edith remembers her mother saying. “When it’s time to come home, come with her.”

Edith was earning about $660 a month. About half went to rent, electricity, food and transportation.

Another $130 went to place Blessings in one of the unlicensed day care centers that had popped up to meet the demand of Kenyan women.

That left Edith with about $200 each month. Nearly all of it went back to Kenya.

Edith covered the $1,700 college tuition of her son, Neville. She proudly bought him a laptop and paid for her elder daughter, Prudence, to enroll in a catering and hospitality course. She contributed to her aging parents’ medical bills.

And she invested in her dream, placing a $1,300 deposit on a half-acre lot. Tribal rules barred her from inheriting her family’s land. This was her chance to build a home.

Their path in Saudi Arabia was far more complicated. Saudi law guarantees schooling, but enrollment requires documentation. So as Blessings began to walk, then talk, Edith taught her English and bought books whenever she could.

“She never forgets,” Edith said, “so teaching her was never hard.”

She told stories about Kenya, about its green landscape, about her family. And as Blessings grew, Edith told her to pray that they would be home soon.

Then the coronavirus pandemic hit. Nobody wanted strangers in their homes. Work dried up. Day care became unaffordable.

So when any job came, she left Blessings, 4, alone in their apartment. She agonized over this. At work all day, unreachable, her mind spun: Was Blessings scared? Was she safe?

“If she wanted to see outside, it was only through peeking out the window,” she said.

Edith decided it was time to leave.

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Credit...Vanessa Saba

Stuck

She arrived at the Kenyan Embassy in April 2023 with Blessings beside her — a child’s first introduction to her home country.

The embassy bustled. In recent years, the Kenyan president, William Ruto, had made foreign jobs a cornerstone of his economic policy. The embassy was ill-equipped to handle the influx.

Women waited in the heat or huddled in the shade, holding passports, paperwork and children. Many had no money or a place to sleep. She recalled them asking — sometimes begging or demanding — for help escaping abuse.

Edith approached the counter and said that she and Blessings wanted to go home. She had money for airfare. But an embassy worker told her that the Saudi government required exit papers. He could not process those documents without a birth certificate. On paper, Blessings did not exist.

The Saudi government says that embassies are responsible for processing birth certificates for children born to foreigners. Kenyan officials say they do just that, despite countless firsthand accounts to the contrary.

What stuck with Edith were seven words: “You have a child. You can’t go.”

Leaving the embassy, Edith devised a plan. Maybe she could get deported.

She began telling taxi drivers to slow down at checkpoints, hoping that officers would notice two foreigners and demand documents. It never happened. “Mommy, we are invisible,” Blessings said. “They can’t see us.”

She showed up at police stations and deportation centers, one after another. None accepted her. “We can’t take you with your child,” she remembers one Saudi officer saying.

The Saudi authorities were reluctant to deport children they could not account for. The same thing that had made it impossible for Blessings to integrate — a lack of a birth certificate — now made her practically impossible to deport.

So Edith and Blessings slept outdoors near a gas station, chasing a rumor that if mothers and children were caught in an immigration raid there, they would be deported together. Women huddled with children, their eyes scanning the road hopefully.

But when the police finally showed up, she said, the officers said they were looking for Ethiopians who had immigrated illegally. Kenyans like Edith, who enter legally, are less of a priority.

Trying to get deported became a full-time job. Broke, she lost her apartment and relied on friends and other mothers for shelter. She borrowed money, spinning stories she could barely bring herself to say. “I was always using lies, lies, lies everywhere,” she said.

So Edith returned to the embassy, to try again to get Blessings her paperwork. But nobody, she said, could explain what documents she needed, and in which order. She visited again and again, waiting whole workdays, only to be told to return later.

Finally, during one visit, an embassy employee asked about the father’s nationality.

“Ghanaian,” Edith replied.

“Then go to the Ghanaian Embassy,” the employee replied.

There, officials proposed a risky solution. Leave Blessings, they said, and report to a deportation center alone. Tell them about Blessings only after the Saudis have completed the deportation paperwork. “They will process the child’s exit visa,” they told her.

Edith was terrified, but it was the only solution that anyone had offered. “If you are sick and the doctor tells you, ‘Eat grass and you will get better,’” Edith said, “You will.”

She delivered Blessings to an acquaintance, explaining that she was about to try something that could get them home. “Pray hard that it works,” she told Blessings.

At the deportation center, Edith was photographed, fingerprinted and locked up.

A few days later, a Kenyan official arrived to consult on the deportations. He recognized Edith and knew she had a daughter.

“Didn’t I tell you that you have a child and cannot leave?” Edith remembers him saying.

The deportation center released her back into the kingdom’s streets.

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Edith and Blessings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.Credit...Iman Al-Dabbagh for The New York Times

Anything but Clear

In November 2023, so many mothers were in Edith’s situation that the Kenyan government arranged DNA tests so that they could prove maternity and receive travel papers.

Dozens of women and children crowded the embassy. Edith pulled Blessings close and got in line.

Hours later, two doctors swabbed their cheeks. Results in three months, they said.

Then something inexplicable happened. As she was leaving, an embassy official asked if she had $25. If she did, he said, he could issue Blessings a birth certificate.

Edith was confused. Why now? What about the DNA tests? Was this a bribe?

Edith had saved up for plane tickets. She had denied herself and Blessings many things for that money.

“Yes,” she said. She had the money.

Like that, Blessings received a “Certificate of Birth of a Citizen of Kenya Occurring Abroad.”

Still, the embassy said she could not leave until the DNA tests confirmed her as the mother. And yet, there she was, holding a birth certificate declaring her to be the mother.

Three months became six months, which became more than a year. Some women received test results. Not Edith and Blessings.

The Kenyan government could not explain the delay. It says it offers a “clear, sequential and lawful pathway” for mothers who want to leave Saudi Arabia.

To Edith, nothing seemed clear. She paid $40 for travel papers, only for them to expire because the test results had not arrived. She had to pay to renew them.

At some point, embassy officials said she and Blessings would need to be taken to a Saudi office for fingerprinting. How soon could she go, she asked? Nobody could ever say.

She would wait outside the embassy for hours, only to be turned away. Then the Saudi fingerprinting officer would be unavailable. Once, an official promised to drive her over, then disappeared.

In February, the embassy finally called: Edith could come in for fingerprinting. Children were processed separately, so it was another three months (with still no DNA results) before Blessings was summoned for fingerprinting.

Nothing had made sense — especially what happened next.

In May, an embassy officer called. Two years had passed since Edith and Blessings first visited the embassy. Finally, the officer said, Edith could go home.

How? What about the DNA tests, which had supposedly been essential? What had changed? The Kenyan government would not say.

On June 7, as streets across the kingdom glowed with Eid al-Adha celebrations, Edith and Blessings arrived at King Khalid International Airport.

An immigration officer gestured them forward. He tugged the staples from Edith’s documents and called colleagues to review them.

The silence dragged.

Then — the stamp. A heavy thud of ink. Permission to pass.

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Edith and Blessings in Vihiga County, Kenya, in August.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

Home

Outside Jomo Kenyatta International Airport in Nairobi, Blessings looked around and giggled: “It’s so green.”

Edith and Blessings attended church that afternoon. As the congregation bowed their heads, Edith closed her eyes and prayed for a new life.

The bus to their hometown in western Kenya was seven hours, overnight.

Edith had promised herself that she would not return empty-handed. Yet there she was, with less than $200. Even her half acre was gone; she had not been able to keep up the payments.

Blessings, now 9, walks to school each morning with Hope, her friend. Classmates call Blessings the “English girl.” Her fluency is a point of pride for Edith.

Edith is 51 and has no savings. Rain leaks through the roof. Unlike her neighbors, she has no goats or cows to provide milk. She wanted to plant corn and sugar cane, but without fertilizer, the land remains bare. One night, a thief stole the lightbulb outside the front door.

Her time in Saudi Arabia had provided many things for her family. But now, looking around their mud house, Edith admits regret. She missed so much — birthdays, graduations, childhoods — and returned with nothing.

She hopes to open a business but is unsure how. Most days, she cannot even plan dinner. She cannot afford meat or rice.

But they have each other, which keeps Edith from spiraling toward loneliness.

On a recent evening, as the air carried the crisp scent of rain, Blessings turned to her mother, her voice tinged with genuine curiosity: “Is this the Kenya you asked me to pray so hard to come back to?”

Edith was quiet for a moment.

“Yes,” she said. “This is our final destination.”

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Edith at home.Credit...Kiana Hayeri for The New York Times

Audio produced by Sarah Diamond.

Abdi Latif Dahir is the East Africa correspondent for The Times, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He covers a broad range of issues including geopolitics, business, society and arts.

Vivian Nereim is the lead reporter for The Times covering the countries of the Arabian Peninsula. She is based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.

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