by Hall, Shyima
Our mother was often gone all day, and when that happened, she locked us in our one room of the apartment. Then we might play dress-up. We used my mother’s clothes and the clothes of my older sisters, although I’m not sure they ever knew this. We often played hide-and-seek under the blankets on the floor. Or we might play “good guy, bad guy,” which was our equivalent of cops and robbers.
I’m not sure why our mother locked us in, but I can make a guess. The neighborhood we lived in was not safe. We lived in a center section of town where there were stabbings or shootings every now and then. And from my earliest days I knew not to speak to strangers. The streets were often busy, and there was the usual noise and activity that occurs when many people live close together. Some of that activity was unsavory, and when our mom thought the neighborhood was unsettled and something might happen, she locked us in. Our neighborhood was small, and news traveled fast. If we knew something like that was going on, we stayed inside. On some days when we were playing outside, friends or neighbors suggested that I get my siblings off the street. Then I’d hurry to round them up and take them to our apartment. On safer days we hung out outside, played games on the street, and moved to the side only when a car came by.
When I wasn’t playing with my brothers and sisters, I kept busy cooking and cleaning. I washed our clothes by hand in a bucket. It was a lot of work, but I washed only the clothes that were absolutely filthy, and it helped that none of us had much to wear. I usually had whatever I was wearing, plus a T-shirt and pants, and then a dress for holidays. All of our clothes were hand-me-downs, and by the time the clothes got to me, they were pretty worn. But I didn’t mind. No one in our neighborhood had a lot; I was no different from anyone else I knew.
We usually had food for dinner, but not always. When we had food, it was rice or bread, and once in a while, meat. If there was money for a few potatoes, we went to a market some distance away to get them. When we got home, my mom would boil the potatoes and we’d share them for dinner. On a good day my mother would make a special recipe of grape leaves stuffed with rice. (Recipe in the back of the book!) Even though my mother often had to modify it because we did not have all of the ingredients, this was a treat!
Most days we ate two meals, and occasionally we might have had fruit or vegetables similar to those eaten here in the United States. I do know that I felt hungry during much of my childhood.
While I was glad to have food, I was even happier on the rare occasions when I got to take a shower. We had only one bathroom for the four apartments in our building, so bathing was not a regular thing. Our bathroom had to be shared by more than twenty people, and a portable heater warmed our water. On top of that we had to have money to buy oil to heat the water and had to carry all of our water, including our drinking and bathing water, from a well that was a long distance from our apartment. This was because we had no running water. For those reasons no one took long showers, although I often had to wait in a long line to use the toilet.
When we slept, we had a blanket under us and a blanket over us. There were no pillows and no designated sleeping places. That’s why I always ended up sleeping in a different part of the room next to a different person. During summer months it got hot in that room, so hot that I could not sleep. I’d toss and turn, sticky with sweat, before getting up in the middle of the night to open our one window.
I wore the same clothes for sleeping that I wore during the day. There was no such thing as pajamas in our family, and most times the next day I’d wear the same clothes I had worn the day, and the night, before.
Then there was the rain. It seemed to me that there was a lot of it. And because our streets were not paved, the hard-packed dirt quickly turned to mud. There often were rivers of mud streaming down the street in front of our apartment. I hated that, because it meant I’d have more clothes to wash in my bucket and a lot more water to haul to wash the clothes in.
But I had some fun, too.
Some of my earliest remembrances are of playing marbles with my siblings out on the street. To play, we drew a circle in the dirt, or outlined a circle on the street with chalk. Then each of the players put some marbles inside the circle. When it was my turn, I’d take a slightly larger marble and try to knock some of the others out of the circle. Any marbles that I knocked out, I got to keep. I had a lot of marbles!
I also had a good time getting dressed up in my dress to visit relatives. These visits were usually with members of my mother’s family. We had to visit secretly, though, as my dad forbade us to visit my mother’s relatives. Often we went on the train to Alexandria and then walked a long way to my grandparents’ house, but once in a while my uncle picked us up in his car. In either case, my mom would whisper to us, “Shhh. Don’t say anything about this.” We never did.
My maternal grandmother and grandfather were warm and loving, and their delight in seeing us was evident. There was always a lot of food and laughter when we visited. My grandmother was the most wonderful, caring lady, and my grandfather always gave us money for the candy store next door. When he passed away from complications related to alcoholism, I was saddened beyond anything I had ever known. I couldn’t have been more than seven years old.
There were many aunts, uncles, and cousins whom we visited at my grandparents’ house, although I no longer remember any of their names. We had many happy times there. When we visited, I felt as if everything was right in my world. And you know what? Everything was right. What it comes down to is that no matter how poor we were, how absent or abusive my father was, how hard I had to work, I was a happy child.
Despite our poverty, I was happy. I understand that some of that feeling was the unbridled joy of being a child, but the other reason for my happiness was love. Even though by American standards I was a neglected child, in those days I loved and was loved. It was all I knew. My younger siblings and I had formed an especially tight bond, and I adored looking out for them and being with them. Life was good.
CHAPTER TWO
My life with my family seems long ago, and my memories of that time feel far away. But there are details I will never forget. The way the dust flew up from the streets whenever a car passed, the feel of the hot dirt under my bare feet when I played outside, the sounds of the children in my neighborhood laughing, the way the colors on the clothes we hung outside to dry faded in the harsh sun.
That is the thing about memories of my early life. Some moments are etched into my mind clearly, and I see them in my mind as if they happened just yesterday. Other moments are fuzzy and vague, and yet others I have no recollection of. I have learned to hold close and treasure the positive memories and the good feelings they give me.
One day our entire household was in an uproar because one of my older sisters had been dismissed from her job in a shameful manner. I was eight years old by this time, and my sister Zahra, one of the twins, had been working for some time for a wealthy man and his wife in Egypt’s capital city of Cairo. Our town near Alexandria was several hours north and west of Cairo by car, and after Zahra went to work in Cairo, I did not see her much. Not that I had seen her much before. Zahra was quite a bit older than I was—when I was eight, she could have been anywhere from sixteen to twenty, or maybe even older—and the age difference between us, and her frequent absences from our home, had made bonding next to impossible.
My parents had arranged for Zahra to work for this family, and while she had been paid a pittance (which my mother had picked up every month), she’d technically been held in bondage. I later learned that Zahra had never had days off, had not been able to leave the home of her employers unescorted and without permission, and had had to endure all sorts of physical and verbal abuse. My sister had essentially worked from sun up to sun down.
In Egypt it is not unusual for a poor family to make a contract like this with a richer family. I think the contract my parents made with this family said that Zahra was supposed to work for them for ten years, and she was into the contract for on
ly two or three years when she was “fired.” When we learned Zahra had been dismissed, there was a lot of yelling. And on this day my father’s yells were exceptionally irate.
A few days later my mother, my youngest sister, and I went to visit Zahra’s former employers in Cairo. I was the oldest girl living at home, so I often traveled with my mother. Most of the travel was to the market or to help her with errands near our apartment. But my baby sister and I had occasionally accompanied our mother when she’d go to pick up Zahra’s “pay.” On a few of those trips I saw the family’s twin boys, who were younger than I was, and their youngest daughter, who was about my age.
Few things stick in my mind from our trip to see Zahra’s former employers, but I do know that I stood in the enormous bedroom of the woman of the house as I held my baby sister. I could not have loved that little girl more if she had been my own child. I am sad to say that I no longer recall her name.
On that day there was another lady in the room. I came to understand that Nebit was a relative of the employer family, and that her family lived in that huge house too. The first woman was lying in her bed, and she told my mom that my sister had stolen money from them. More than my family could ever pay back. My mother had already confirmed this fact with my sister and knew the accusation to be true.
“You can’t pay back what your girl stole,” said the lady in Arabic. “So you can either provide us with someone else to work to repay the debt or we’ll call the police.”
Tears leaked from my mother’s eyes. I stood, silent, holding back my wild emotions. I felt afraid of this lady’s threat, and sad for my mother’s tears.
Then the woman said, “I can train the young one from the ground up, and we won’t have these adult issues of stealing.”
From what I could gather from the rest of the conversation, the contract my parents had made with this family was that my sister was supposed to have lived in this home and helped with the cooking and cleaning. Then I heard my mother agree that the fair thing for everyone was for another girl to work in Zahra’s place.
“All right. It’s a deal,” the woman said in Arabic.
The pit of my stomach lurched when I realized the girl they were talking about was me.
Then my mother began to talk about me as if I were nothing more than a piece of furniture, a commodity. How could she talk about me in this callous manner? Didn’t she love me anymore? A black hole formed in the core of my being as I realized I was going to have to leave my mother, my siblings, my home, my life. I had rarely been outside of my neighborhood and had certainly never been around strangers this far from home. I was confused and began to cry hard enough to shake my whole body.
When we are young, it often is the emotion of an experience that stays with us the longest. A child might not remember the details of a bad dream, but the feeling of terror the dream brings can remain for a lifetime. That’s how that day is for me. The feeling of abandonment is almost as fresh today as it was fifteen years ago, when I was eight. I had not had much experience in life, but I knew that families were supposed to stick together. Parents were supposed to nurture and support their children, not sell them to strangers.
I have spent many hours wondering about my parents’ motivation. While Zahra had been earning a tiny amount of money every month that had gone to my parents, my employment in the house would be for the sole purpose of paying off her debt. This was not just the debt from the money she’d stolen; it was a debt of honor. My sister had caused this family grief, and to make up for that I was expected to become their domestic slave.
Why did my mother not say no? Why did she not fight for me? I was eight! Were we so destitute that my family could no longer feed me? Did my mother think my prospects were better living with this woman and her family as their slave than they would be if I lived at home? Was our family “honor” that much more important than I was? Had my parents been told the truth about what my position in the home would be? Did my father even care for me? Why did he allow this?
In recent years I have had a lot of therapy to better deal with the issues these questions have raised, and I have mostly made my peace with what happened. But on that day, when I was an eight-year-old child, I felt thrown away, and I was terrified that I would never see my home again. Unfortunately, I was right.
• • •
My mother hugged me tightly before I said a sad good-bye to my baby sister. My mother’s final words to me were “Be strong.”
On one hand, I could not believe she was leaving me there. On the other, I held out hope that I was going to stay for only a few days, a week at the most. In either case I felt betrayed. I was too young to understand that slavery was not an unusual situation for Egyptian families of our lower economic status. For my parents, for this family, this was part of life.
With tears falling down my face, I looked out the window as my mother walked down the long driveway with my beloved baby sister. I wanted to savor every last drop of my family, so I watched until my mother turned a corner and I could no longer see her.
Neither my mother nor I knew when we walked into that house that day that I would not return home with her. Because of that I had nothing with me. No clothes, not even a familiar blanket or a photo of my family. I had nothing, and I was devastated.
I never learned what happened to Zahra after I left, but I imagine that my father beat her—that is, he may have if she ever came home when he was there. It is possible that she did not see him for some time, or that she was sold to someone else. I’m fairly certain she was an adult by this time, though, and may have had more options. However, in the aftermath of her theft, Zahra was “tainted goods,” which would have made “employment,” or marriage to a quality man, difficult. Plus, the reason Zahra had been sold into slavery in the first place might have been because she was the family troublemaker. Maybe my mother and father had misguidedly thought it would settle her down and help her grow up. Or maybe they’d valued the money their child produced more than they’d valued the child.
I don’t know if Zahra stole money from the family because she’d planned to run away and escape her bondage, or if she stole it because she knew that the act would cause her to be returned to our family. I tend to think the first scenario holds the truth, but I may never know for sure.
These unanswered questions are typical of my life, and of the lives of many children (and adults) who are held in bondage. Slaves often lose track of family and places, and memories fade or become distorted. Unfortunately, there are thousands of us—children and adults who live their lives in slavery in Egypt, Europe, and even in the United States.
According to the United States Department of Health and Human Services, human trafficking is the fastest-growing criminal industry in the world today. There are two different forms of human trafficking: in one a person is recruited under false circumstances, and in the second a person is sold without his or her knowledge or consent. The latter is what happened to me, and is slavery in its truest sense. A few years ago I was stunned to learn from a 2005 Trafficking in Persons Report by the State Department in Washington that as many as eight hundred thousand people are trafficked across international borders every year. Half of those victims are believed to be children.
Most people think slavery in the United States was stamped out during the Civil War, but that’s not true. Legalized slavery is gone, but today as many as 17,500 people who are held in bondage are illegally brought into our country every year. And it is estimated that there are more than forty-three thousand slaves in the United States at any given time. Even worse, there are as many as twenty-seven million slaves globally.
In the United States only about 2 percent of those who are held in bondage are eventually rescued. I find that number appalling, but it is a higher percentage than in other countries. Many of the rescues here come through tips that neighbors give to their local police departments. A neighbor has a feeling something is not quite right next door, and after long deliberation th
ey finally call.
But in Cairo there was no nosey neighbor, and no one called. No one knew I was there, because the estate these people lived on was huge and the mansion was far away from other houses. A few days, or maybe a week, after my mother left me in the home of these strangers, my new cruel reality began to dawn on me on a deeper level—that I was not going home. Ever. I became hysterical and insisted that someone call my mother and tell her to come pick me up.
That was difficult for several reasons. First, my family did not have a telephone. Second, my captors, as I came to think of the man and his wife, were not about to call my mother. Instead I pleaded with and enlisted the help of some of the other people who worked in the house. There were several, all adults, who worked and lived in the household in various capacities, and they were kind to me. It took some time, but eventually I found my mother on the other end of the phone line. I was so happy to hear her voice that I was probably incoherent. But the tone of her voice shattered me.
“You are good. You do good for our family. You must stay there,” she said. “If you do not, bad things will happen to you.”
I could barely breathe. My mother had truly abandoned me. Didn’t she want me? How had this happened? What had I done to deserve this? Of course the answer was: nothing. I had done nothing but be a happy young girl who loved her family. I found that for me the old saying “bad things sometimes happen to good people” was true.
When I hung up the phone, I turned around and looked at my coworkers in dismay. This life of slavery, of bondage, was going to be my life. Forever. I crumpled to the floor and sobbed.
It turned out that I was not held in bondage forever, although every day I was a slave was a day too many. I was one of the lucky ones; I was one of the fortunate 2 percent. I was rescued, but that wouldn’t happen for a number of years. First I had many tears to shed. I had to find inner resources that I didn’t know existed, and I would have to travel halfway around the world before the freedom I longed for was mine.
