They still can’t believe the swarm of journalists, microphones and cameras who came to welcome them as they left the Hotel Ibis Batignolles in Paris on Tuesday, May 25. The kind of mob that is usually reserved for stars or ministers, but not for chambermaids … Yet here are these invisible people in the light, celebrating, fist raised, their victory against the Accor group and its cleaning subcontractor STN, after twenty-two months of conflict.
A few days later, Rachel Kéké, 47, welcomes us to her apartment in a popular district of Chevilly-Larue (Val-de-Marne) with Sylvie Kimissa, 50, her colleague. It is together that they led this fight. “We’re exhausted, but it’s for a good cause! ” Rachel Kéké’s WhatsApp account is overflowing with ” Well done ! »« You say to yourself: is it really us who did that? In Africa, if you claim your rights, you get fired or you get fooled [embêter] by the police ! France taught me a lot. ”
Children in the country, moves
The two women chose to receive us “In traditional dress”. Rachel Kéké, now French, was born in Ivory Coast. She arrived in France at the age of 26, in 2000, after the military coup that overthrew Henri Konan Bédié. “We were traumatized. And then, over there, you wait for Europe, you want to discover a developed country. » Hairdresser, she comes to work in the living room of her uncle who lodges her for a time in Paris.
Sylvie Kimissa, 50, has a ten-year resident card. She left Congo-Brazzaville, where she was employed in a taxiphone, in 2009. Her husband brought her to Italy. But the couple quickly split up. She then joined her sister in Beauvais, in the Oise.
“At the end of my first day, I almost gave up… And then you think about the future of your children and you take heart. »Rachel Kéké
Rachel Kéké and Sylvie Kimissa do not know each other yet, but they share the same erratic path of life. They left children in the country, a son for Rachel, two daughters for Sylvie. Their first years in France were precarious, punctuated by moves to relatives from one end of Ile-de-France to the other.
They are nannies, cashiers … “But, for a mother, the hours are complicated. And you don’t have enough to pay someone to take care of your children ”, says Rachel Kéké, who had four by a second husband, from whom she separated. She has since remarried. Sylvie Kimissa has also rebuilt her life and settled with her partner and their son, 10 years old today, in Bondy (Seine-Saint-Denis).
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