and one of them is slavery, in any form. As I was growing up I tried to understand how people could be so cruel as to kidnap people and bring them over the ocean in terrible conditions only to treat them as less than animals once they got here because they were too damn lazy to do the work themselves.
Now there's modern slavery, some of which is happening right here in the United States. Sure, it's no longer sanctioned by our government, and if someone from our government finds out about the slavery there is a heavy price to pay. I just read an article on the Huffington Post that made me extremely sad and angry. The article is about a girl named Shyima who was brought over to America when she was 10 years old to work as a slave in the couple's house. The article doesn't say anything about her getting beat or sexually abused, but there was plenty of neglect and verbal abuse.
She worked in these people's house for 20 hours. They made her cook and clean up after themselves and their five children. The parents called her "servant" while the kids called her "stupid." She wasn't allowed to go to school until she was taken out of that home. She was forced to live in a garage with no light because the lightbulb burned out and the couple who brought her over simply refused to change the lightbulb. She wasn't allowed to wash her clothes in the washer and dryer because her clothes were "dirtier" than everyone else's, so she handwashed them in a bucket in her "room" and hung them out to dry beside the garbage cans outside. The neighbors of the couple never really put two and two together, and the couple acted like she was merely doing chores.
The trafficking of children for domestic labor in the U.S. is an extension of an illegal but common practice in Africa. Families in remote villages send their daughters to work in cities for extra money and the opportunity to escape a dead-end life. Some girls work for free on the understanding that they will at least be better fed in the home of their employer.
The custom has led to the spread of trafficking, as well-to-do Africans accustomed to employing children immigrate to the U.S. Around one-third of the estimated 10,000 forced laborers in the United States are servants trapped behind the curtains of suburban homes, according to a study by the National Human Rights Center at the University of California at Berkeley and Free the Slaves, a nonprofit group. No one can say how many are children, especially since their work can so easily be masked as chores.
Once behind the walls of gated communities like this one, these children never go to school. Unbeknownst to their neighbors, they live as modern-day slaves, just like Shyima, whose story is pieced together through court records, police transcripts and interviews.
This is terrible. Her father is sick, and her family back in Africa was actually living in worse conditions than Shyima. I don't think they've seen their daughter since she left Africa with that couple.
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.
[snip]
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."
As I read the article I was simply amazed at the callousness of the couple. This practice is apparently also illegal in Africa. When the police went to question the couple after hearing that a young girl was living in their garage, the couple lied to the police and said she was merely doing chores like all of their children. Shyima never even thought to run away.
Well, the couple was eventually convicted for various crimes including forced labor and slavery:
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.
Well, Shyima's story has a bittersweet ending:
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."
When her father died last year, her family had no way of reaching her.
You guys should really go read the entire article, I was amazed and disgusted at the same time. The story itself was bad enough, but the epilogue was what really made me tear up:
On a recent afternoon in Cairo, Madame Amal 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 to be around 9 years old.
People like that should be locked up for LIFE. I can almost understand that the families who basically sell their children into slavery feel like they have no choice, but that doesn't make it right. I may have my fair share of complaints in my life, but reading articles like the one I'm talking about in this diary make me really appreciate that I have this life because it could be so much worse.
There are some things I will never understand, and there are some things I never WANT to understand. Slavery, be it historical or modern, is something I never want to be able to understand.
Picture 1: The house where Shyima worked
Picture 2: The garage where she lived (I don't think it's a pic of what it looked like when she was forced to live there)
Picture 3: Shyima's mother and sisters back in Egypt after telling Shyima that her father died
Picture 4: Shyima in her new life