MYSORE: Caught in debt trap and lured by the assurance made by her agent, she headed towards Iraq. She thought she could make more money than what she could earn here. But things didn’t work out as she had hoped. The war that broke out in Iraq shattered her dreams and she came back to Mysore.
Shobha Prabhakaran of Bogadi, a nurse, is now searching for a job after returning from Iraq.
Sharing her experiences, Shobha said: “I went to Iraq in 2012 but returned in the same year. The next time I went to Iraq was in July 2013 and returned on April 20, 2014.”
“We were in debt and had even sold our house to solve the financial problems. It was then I decided to fly to Iraq, thinking I could come out of debt at the earliest. I was employed as a staff nurse in a hospital and the job lasted only for a few months,” she said.
“There is a good demand for staff nurses in Iraq. Most of the patients whom we attended were those with either bullet injuries or injured by explosives. It was on December 26, 2013, the situation turned worse as bombs exploded near my flat. With repeated sounds of gun shots and blasts, I was disgusted,” she said.
The government of Kerala has announced a house, cash and a job for those nurses who returned from Iraq, she said. “I request our state government to provide a job to me. I have an aged mother to lookafter and I am the only woman from the state had been to Iraq,” she requested.