I recently had the worst experience getting a housemaid from the Filipines. First the agency (which I will post their name later) asked for 7,000 Riyals to get us a housemaid. When she arrived (which only took a month), the agency basically said "Here she is, and here is her paperwork". I asked "Now what do I need to do?" They responded by saying I needed to go to immigration. And so begins the nightmare. I asked the agency if they had some type of OUTLINE to tell us step by step what needed to be done. They said NO. That they were only in charge of getting her here. Since she saw that we were completely lost she requested an additional 1,800 for the sponsor paperwork.....We said NO WAY! That should be part of the 7,000. If it is not then what was the purpose of paying you 7,000 Riyals? They said to bring her here. They also said that they needed to pay the agency in the Filipines. Come to find out, there is no agency in the Filipines. The housemaid later told us that her next door neighbor asked if she was interested in working here because she knew someone who is recruiting. A plane ticket is about 500-700 dollars. We paid almost $2,000US for her to get here. So the agency made 1,500 off of us and also requested an additional 1,800 riyals. EXTORTION. I say EXTORTION because in addition to all the money they were asking for the maid paid $300US application fee in the Filipines, and they also wanted her to pay half of her salary for 3 months once she got paid from us....The sad part is the agency is ran by Filipines.....Whatever happened to helping your people? Well we tried this on our own and asked other people who had to go through getting a housemaid for help. IN ADDITION TO THIS, they brought the housemaid here under a tourist VISA instead of a work VISA, so that meant that we had to pay an additional 500 riyals to changed her VISA to a work VISA. This agency promised us that she was here on a WORK VISA and that there would be no need to pay extra. HA!

I will continue this later by giving step by step directions on what to do once the housemaid is here.

I hope not all agencies are like this one.