BY ELISE BARTHET, SCIENCES PO, SPECIAL TO THE MEDILL NEWS SERVICE

We stopped the car at an anonymous-looking building just outside Beirut that nearly disappeared behind an enormous yellow billboard. A blue drawing covers half the space of the ad. It pictures an Asian woman in an apron shyly proffering a tray of tea. Her look is submissive, the message eloquent. Even to customers who cannot read Arabic.

Inside, the manager of the company, the Manco Group, is all business, seated in front of an empty desk. A brisk offer of coffee to the visitors, then, she plunges into a sales pitch. "From my experience, Ethiopian is the best," she says. "Sri Lankans run away after two days and Filipinas are too expensive."

The harshness of the declaration sounds strange to an outsider's ears, but we try not to look surprised. After all, in Lebanon, buying a maid is as common as buying a car. And just like cars, maids are imported.

Business is booming in Lebanon for companies that recruit foreign women to work as maids, housekeepers and nannies. In this country, ruined by 30 years of civil war and a never-ending political crisis, running an agency has become a safe and easy way to make money.

In five years, the number of such employment agencies has nearly doubled from 250 to 418. This tiny Middle Eastern nation of only four million people has an estimated 120,000 maids, most of them from Sri Lanka, the Philippines and Africa. According to The Daily Star, a Lebanese newspaper, one out of every 16 individuals in Lebanon is a foreign maid.

These women are part of a massive global industry that moves manpower from poor developing countries around the world to richer, or in some cases, marginally less poor nations, where they care for children and clean houses.

Workers are exported and imported by means of a sophisticated network of job agencies across the world. Each Lebanese agency has its counterpart in the country of origin of the migrants. One furnishes the maid; the other, the employer. But the business is largely unregulated, notwithstanding that the products being marketed are human beings.