Shyima’s story: Now a teen, a former slave copes with her past
Published 10:18 pm Thursday, January 1, 2009
About one-third of the forced laborers in the U.S. are servants trapped in suburban homes. This is the second of a two-part story about Shyima, who was ‘leased’ at the age of 9 by a rich Egyptian couple to be their maid and brought to California. Read the first part of the series by clicking here.
IRVINE, Calif. — If you could move the garage where Shyima slept 7,000 miles to the sandy alleyway where her Egyptian family now lives, it would pass for the best home in the neighborhood.
The garage’s walls are made of concrete instead of hand-patted bricks. Its roof doesn’t leak. Its door shuts all the way. Shyima’s mother and her 10 brothers and sisters live in a two-bedroom house with uneven walls and a flaking ceiling. None of them have ever had a bed to themselves, much less a whole room. At night, bodies cover the sagging couches.
Shown a snapshot of the windowless garage, Shyima’s mother in the coastal town of Agami made a clucking sound of approval.
“It’s much cleaner than where many people here sleep,” said Hany Helal, director of the Cairo-based Egyptian Organization for Child Rights. He explains that Shyima’s treatment in the Ibrahim home is considered normal — even good — by Egyptian standards.
Even though many child maids are physically abused, child labor is rarely prosecuted because the work isn’t considered strenuous. Many employers even see themselves as benefactors.
“There is a sense that children should work to help their family, but also that they are being given an opportunity,” said Mark Lagon, the director of the U.S. State Department’s Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons.
That’s especially the case for well-off families who transport their child servants to Western countries.
In 2006, a U.S. district court in Michigan sentenced a Cameroonian man to 17 years in prison for bringing a 14-year-old girl from his country to work as his unpaid maid. That same year, a Moroccan couple was sentenced to home confinement for forcing their 12-year-old Moroccan niece to work grueling hours caring for their baby.
In Germantown, Md., a Nigerian couple used their daughter’s passport to bring in a 14-year-old Nigerian girl as their maid. She worked for them for five years before escaping in 2001. In Germany, France, the Netherlands and England, African immigrants have been arrested for forcing children from their home countries to work as their servants.
In several of these cases, the employers argued that they took the children with the parents’ permission. The Cameroonian girl’s mother flew to Detroit to testify in court against her daughter, saying the girl was ungrateful for the good life her employers had provided her.
Shyima’s mother, Salwa Mahmoud, said her father believed she would have better opportunities in America.
“I didn’t want her to travel but our family’s condition dictated that she had to go,” explained Mahmoud, a squat, round-faced woman with calloused hands and feet. She is missing two front teeth because she couldn’t afford a dentist.
“If she had stayed here in Egypt, she would have been ordinary,” said Awatef, Shyima’s older sister. “Just like us.”
Police to the rescue
On April 3, 2002, an anonymous caller phoned the California Department of Social Services to report that a young girl was living inside the garage of 28 Pacific Grove.
A few days later, Nasser Ibrahim opened the door to a detective from the Irvine Police Department. Asked if any children lived there beside his own, he first said no, then yes — “a distant relative.” He said he had “not yet” enrolled her in school. She did “chores — just like the other kids,” according to police.
Shyima, now 12, was upstairs cleaning when Ibrahim came to get her. “He told me that I was not allowed to say anything,” said Shyima. “That if I said anything I would never see my parents again.”
When police searched the house, they turned up several home videos showing Shyima at work. They seized the contract signed by Shyima’s illiterate parents.
Asked by police if anyone other than his immediate family lived in the house, Eid, one of the couple’s twins, said: “Hummm … Yeah … Her name is Shyima,” according to the transcript. “She uh … She works — she works for us at the house, like, she cleans up the dishes and stuff like that.”
Twelve-year-old Heba got flustered: “Yeah. She’s uh — my — uh — How do I say this? Uh … My dad’s … Oh, wait, like … She’s like my cousin, but — She’s my dad’s daughter’s friend. Oops! The other way. Okay, I’m confused.”
Heba eventually admitted that Shyima had lived with the family for three years in Egypt and in California.
The police put Shyima in a squad car. They noted her hands were red and caked with dead, hard-looking skin.
‘Wasn’t I a human being too?’
For months Shyima lied to investigators, saying what the Ibrahims had told her to say.
She went without sleep for days at a stretch. She was put on four different types of medication. She moved from foster home to foster home. Her mood swings alarmed her guardians. In school for the first time, she struggled to learn to read.
Investigators arranged for her to speak to her parents. She told them she felt like a “nobody” working for the Ibrahims and wanted to come home. Her father yelled at her.
“They kept telling me that they’re good people,” Shyima recounted in a recent interview. “That it’s my fault. That because of what I did my mom was going to have a heart attack.”
Three years ago, she broke off contact with her family. Since then she has refused to speak Arabic. She can no longer communicate in her mother tongue.
During the 2006 trial, the Ibrahims described Shyima as part of their family. They included proof of a trip she took with the family to Disneyland. Shyima’s lawyer pointed out that the 10-year-old wasn’t allowed on the rides — she was there to carry the bags.
The couple’s lawyers collected photographs of the home where Shyima grew up, including close-ups of the feces-stained squat toilet and of Shyima’s sisters washing clothes in a bucket.
In her final plea, Amal Ibrahim told the judge it would be unfair to separate her from her children. Enraged, Shyima, then 17, told the court she hadn’t seen her family in years.
“Where was their loving when it came to me? Wasn’t I a human being too? I felt like I was nothing when I was with them,” she sobbed.
The couple pleaded guilty to all charges, including forced labor and slavery. They were ordered to pay $76,000, the amount Shyima would have earned at the minimum wage. The sentence: Three years in federal prison for Ibrahim, 22 months for his wife, and then deportation for both. Their lawyers declined to comment for this story.
“I don’t think that there is any other term you could use than modern-day slavery,” said Bob Schoch, the special agent in charge for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Los Angeles, in describing Shyima’s situation.
Shyima was adopted last year by Chuck and Jenny Hall of Beaumont, Calif. The family lives near Disneyland, where they have taken her a half-dozen times. She graduated from high school this summer after retaking her exit exam and hopes to become a police officer.
Shyima, now 19, has a list of assigned chores. She wears purple eyeshadow, has a boyfriend and frequently updates her profile on MySpace. Her hands are neatly manicured.
But in her closet, she keeps a box of pictures of her parents and her brothers and sisters. “I don’t look at them because it makes me cry,” she said. “How could they? They’re my parents.”
A second Shyima?
On a recent afternoon in Cairo, Amal Ibrahim walked into the lobby of her apartment complex wearing designer sunglasses and a chic scarf.
After nearly two years in a U.S. prison cell, she’s living once more in the spacious apartment where Shyima first worked as her maid. The apartment is adorned in the style of a Louis XIV palace, with ornately carved settees, gold-leaf vases and life-sized portraits of her and her husband.
She did not agree to be interviewed for this story.
Before the door closed behind her, a little girl slipped in carrying grocery bags. She wore a shabby T-shirt. Her small feet slapped the floor in loose flip-flops. Her eyes were trained on the ground.
She looked about 9 years old.
