Enslaved in Palo Alto

But Alice, a shy, soft-spoken 26-year-old with wide eyes and a round, distinctive face, says the conditions of her employment were not the same as what she had agreed to. She asserts that Njuguna-Githinji, who is now at Harvard University as a Mason Fellow in public policy, promised her a six-day workweek of six hours a day at $6 to $6.75 an hour. Though Alice has never been given a copy, Njuguna-Githinji presented an employment contract to the U.S. Embassy -- a requirement of the visa that allowed Alice to work in the United States temporarily.

But the promises, Alice says, disappeared once they set foot on American soil. In a civil lawsuit filed in Santa Clara County in July 2003, she alleges that she was only paid between $50 and $120 a month, receiving a total of $370 for five months' labor. Court documents also say that Alice was expected to clean the house every day, cook all the meals, and tend to Njuguna-Githinji's son at any hour of the day or night. She was required to do laundry by hand, though the apartment had a washer and dryer. She rarely got a day off, and was told not to speak to anyone for fear of deportation. In addition to the long hours and paltry pay, Alice alleges in court filings that she was constantly insulted, berated, and even threatened by Njuguna-Githinji.

Alice says she knew that what was happening to her wasn't right, but she felt chained to her job. In court documents, she says that Njuguna-Githinji had confiscated her travel documents and warned Alice that immigration officials would deport her if she strayed too far from the apartment; Alice also told me that Njuguna-Githinji had convinced her she couldn't wire money home. And though it wasn't part of the original arrangement, Alice was now expected to repay Njuguna-Githinji the cost of the airplane ticket from Kenya.

Njuguna-Githinji has denied all of Alice's allegations. "Wanja didn't threaten or mistreat Alice," says William Abrams, a Stanford professor and an attorney with Pillsbury Winthrop, who is taking on the case pro bono.

Alice didn't have a name for her problem, but according to United Nations protocol and United States law, the conditions she describes would make her a victim of human trafficking. Though the media tends to fixate on the more salacious stories of people trafficked into sex slavery (as evidenced by the controversial Jan. 25 New York Times Magazine story "Sex Slaves on Main Street"), those cases, while horrendous, constitute only part of this international problem; instances involving people like Alice, brought to this country to labor under false pretenses, remain a woefully overlooked and misunderstood crisis. Her claims are particularly poignant given Njuguna-Githinji's record of working on behalf of Kenyan women.

With the help of pro bono attorneys, Alice has filed for asylum and a special visa for trafficking victims, both of which are still pending. The civil suit she filed against Njuguna-Githinji (which does not specifically mention trafficking) seeks more than $25,000 in damages on claims of such harbingers of trafficking as peonage and involuntary servitude, fraud, false imprisonment, and violating California labor laws. Until her case is resolved, Alice lives on charity -- unable to work, unable to go home.

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What some international experts have called "the human rights issue of the 21st century," trafficking typically involves a worker -- farm laborer, seamstress, domestic staffer, prostitute -- who has been deceived about the terms of a job abroad, and who is then forced to work against her will through, as federal law states, "the use of force, fraud, coercion for the purpose of subjection to involuntary servitude, peonage, debt bondage, or slavery."

"Trafficking is not about chains and whips; it also has to do with psychological imprisonment -- as well as physical and sexual abuse," says Joy Zarembka of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies, which offers legal and social service help to trafficking victims. "Using threats to keep [domestic workers] enslaved in the home has been an incredibly successful tactic. People are threatened or spoken to in a way that makes them feel compelled to work because they believe there will be negative consequences if they don't."

Alice says she was deceived about her pay and work hours when she moved to the Bay Area. And yet, because of alleged verbal abuse and physical threats from her employer, and because, she claims, her visa and passport had been confiscated, Alice -- whom I met with twice in the presence of her attorneys -- says she was not free to leave.

Situations like hers have been documented for years. "In [domestic worker] cases, workers' isolation is so extreme and the culture of fear created by their employers ... is so great that the workers believe they will suffer serious harm if they leave their jobs, and have no choice but to remain in and continue laboring in abusive conditions," Human Rights Watch researcher Carol Pier wrote in her 2001 report Hidden in the Home: Abuse of Domestic Workers With Special Visas in the United States.