Irvine, Calif. ? Late at night, the neighbors saw a little girl at the kitchen sink of the house next door.

They watched through their window as she rinsed plates, not much taller than the counter. To put dishes away, she climbed on a chair.

She was not the daughter of the couple next door. She was their maid.

Shyima was 10 when a wealthy Egyptian couple brought her from a poor village in Egypt to work in their California home. She awoke before dawn and often worked past midnight to iron their clothes, mop the marble floors and dust the family’s crystal. She earned $45 a month working up to 20 hours a day. She had no breaks during the day and no days off.

The trafficking of children for domestic labor in the U.S. is an extension of an illegal but common practice in Africa. Village families send their daughters to work in cities for extra money. Some girls work for free on the understanding that they will at least be better fed in the home of their employer.

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.

Once behind the walls of gated communities, these children never go to school. They live as modern-day slaves, just like Shyima.

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Shyima cried when she found out she was going to America in 2000. Her father, a bricklayer, had fallen ill a few years earlier, so her mother found a maid recruiter, signed a contract effectively leasing her daughter to the couple for 10 years and told Shyima to be strong.

For a year, Shyima, 9, worked in the Cairo apartment owned by Amal Motelib and Nasser Ibrahim.

The U.S. State Department found that over the past year, children have been trafficked to work as servants in at least 33 of Africa’s 53 countries. But the problem is so well hidden that authorities — including the U.N., Interpol and the State Department — have no idea how many child maids now work in the West.

“In most homes, these girls are not allowed to use so much as the same spoon as the rest of the family,” said Hany Helal, the Cairo-based director of the Egyptian Organization for Child Rights.

By the time the Ibrahims decided to leave, Shyima’s family had taken several loans from them for medical bills. The Ibrahims said they could only be repaid by sending Shyima to work for them in the U.S. A friend posed as her father, and the U.S. embassy in Cairo issued her a six-month tourist visa.

She arrived at Los Angeles International Airport on Aug. 3, 2000, according to court documents. The family brought her to their spacious five-bedroom, two-story home, in the style of a Tuscan villa with a fountain of two angels spouting water through a conch. She was told to sleep in the garage.

It had no windows and was neither heated nor air-conditioned. Soon the garage’s only light bulb went out. From then on, Shyima lived in the dark.

She was told to call them Madame Amal and Hajj Nasser, terms of respect. They called her “shaghala,” or servant. Their five children called her “stupid.”

While the family slept, she ironed the school outfits of the Ibrahims’ 5-year-old twin sons. Then she ironed clothes and fixed breakfast for the three girls, including Heba, who at 10 was the same age as the family’s servant.

Neither Ibrahim nor his wife worked. As they ate breakfast watching TV, she cleaned the palatial house. She vacuumed each bedroom, made the beds, dusted the shelves, wiped the windows, washed the dishes and did the laundry.

Her employers were not satisfied, she said. “Nothing was ever clean enough for her,’ said Shyima.

She started wetting her bed. Her sheets stank. So did her oversized T-shirt and her other hand-me-downs.

It never occurred to her to run away. “I thought this was normal,” she said.

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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, a detective from the Irvine Police Department asked Nasser Ibrahim if any children lived there beside his own. He said no, then yes — “a distant relative.”

Shyima was upstairs cleaning when Ibrahim came to get her. The police put Shyima in a squad car. They noted her hands were red and caked with dead, hard-looking skin.

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During the 2006 trial, the Ibrahims pleaded guilty to all charges, including forced labor and slavery. They were ordered to pay $76,000, the amount Shyima would have earned at minimum wage. The sentence: Three years in federal prison for Ibrahim, 22 months for his wife, and deportation for both. Their lawyers declined to comment.

“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. 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. But in her closet, she keeps a box of pictures of her parents and her brothers and sisters. “How could they?” she asks. “They’re my parents.”