Raised by her widowed mother in a Tamil village in the Eastern Province of Sri Lanka, "Sandy," born Pooranam Elayathamby, grew up in poverty with her five sisters. Married at sixteen, she had three children before twenty and was widowed by age thirty. In the middle of a frightening twenty-year civil war that claimed the lives of tens of thousands of people and left her family destitute, Sandy had no choice but to accept a housemaid job in the Middle East, working in Kuwait and Saudi Arabia for nearly fifteen years, to send money home. She was one of the thousands of Sri Lankan women who...