AS 82 GIRLS ARE RELEASED: TIMES THAT TRY MUMS’ SOULS

AS 82 GIRLS ARE RELEASED: TIMES THAT TRY MUMS’ SOULS 

In a world with rare redemptive news, it was wonderful to learn of the release of 82 Chibok girls weeks after the 3rd anniversary of their abduction. One of the escaped girls in our US school project beamed as she showed me pictures on her cell phone gleaned from the internet of her recently freed cousin.

Here’s why this is important to her. One of the reasons the girls liked being relocated for their education was survivors’ remorse. “Anytime our friends’ mums see us, they would break into tears wondering where their own children are,” one said.

Yes in addition to being stigmatized and called “Boko Haram wives” at home and even “Boko Haram girls” in Western media no less, this is a real very personal cross the escaped girls have to bear.

After the initial euphoria, a certain disquiet is creeping in. Out of 195 missing girls less than half are back. Which parent won the 3-year lottery and which didn’t?

A few weeks ago I visited with Mary mum of one of the missing. I have never seen her so forlorn and it wasn’t because her meager government salary hasn’t been paid since last year. During the Christmas break, someone got word to her that the terrorists hadn’t released her daughter as punishment for her outspoken #bringbackourgirls advocacy.

Can you think of any worse pressure to put on a mum than to hold her responsible for her daughter’s captivity? She could do nothing to prevent her daughter’s abduction but is she doing something to prevent her release? Sadly enough she did try to prevent the abduction even requesting government officials who ran the school to let her daughter leave the dorms. Days after the denial, she was taken…

Dejectedly she shared how the parents of the 21 girls released last year came to town to see their daughters – and left without meeting her. No one said anything to her. Not even the government called her when her daughter was featured spokesperson in the last proof of life video…

Until one day, her phone rang. It was an anonymous number.  The girl on the other end was 1/21. “I asked my dad for your number,” she said. “Your daughter is fine. We were all asked to line up one day. They said they wanted 20 of us. They counted up to 20. Then they decided to add one more – the girl with the baby. Your daughter was #22. She cried when it stopped short of her but they said she’d be in the next batch to be released.”

There is anxiety in Chibok. Some names on the government list of freed girls are duplicates and some misspelt. This means someone’s daughter could be there but is not properly identified or vice versa. Most parents have not been notified by the government. With limited literacy and internet, all rely on outsiders to scour the web in search of the “lucky list” and tell them. It doesn’t help that there is simply no good, authenticated, official list of the abducted 276 out there.

No one wants to be the bearer of bad tidings to our friend that her daughter, #22, is not in this batch. Rather our team is nitpicking the list to find her erroneously tucked away somewhere in there…

This is where the government system needs improvement. There has to be a way to bring all the families together and give them updates and briefings instead of shuttering all the girls who returned last year away with prized intel. Some of the girls are dead. We have names but for a year now no one wants to bell the cat and tell the parents whose daughters’ names will never make the list…

These are times that try men’s souls, be it the pastor whose two daughters were taken none of whom appear to be released or the Muslim dad I met one of whose two daughters escaped back with a baby months ago but has no word on his other daughter.

I recall how I first heard of Mary, in 2014. One of the escaped girls we relocated to US phoned me from her residential high school. “Uncle, I called my friend’s mother to check on her. She asked me if anyone in America was still speaking about the missing girls. I told her ‘uncle Emma’ does.” I was so touched that this girl in the US would call her.

When I saw Mary recently I asked if the girl had called. Not anymore, she said. Instigated by covert agents of the Nigerian embassy, this girl mysteriously became part of some girls who dropped out of our program claiming they were “forced” to tell their stories to the media which incidentally is precisely a sore point for an embarrassed regime…

The internationalization of the #bringbackourgirls campaign is precisely the embarrassment necessary to force governments to do the needful as autocrats tend to be more vulnerable to foreign scorn than the home variety. As mostly poor, rural, Christian girls, the Chibok girls were at the bottom of the pecking order in conservative Muslim-dominated Borno state of Nigeria. Only pesky “do gooders” like a pro Nigeria regime apologist, Ada Obi, tagged us rights advocates in a spiteful op ed rant, could have revalued these girls’ lives to be worth a king’s ransom.

Mother’s Day will try women’s souls in Chibok this Sunday. Just like the parents in the waiting room after the Sandy Hook school massacre. A name would be called and parents would be escorted out of the waiting room. Until names stopped being called and no one came to get anyone. And everyone just sat there and knew – no more list.

Last summer, Sa’a, one of the escaped girls in our US program gave a moving answer about not feeling survivor’s remorse. “I feel God let me escape so I could be a voice for my classmates.”

Here’s why Sa’a who’s now in college is resilient. As her friend injured in the escape attempt hobbled along 3 years ago, she begged Sa’a to leave her to die and save herself. “What will I tell your parents if I go home and they ask of you?” Fired on by foresight, she found help and saved them both.

She may have skirted the problem of survivor’s guilt but the 21 year old has a new cross to bear. “I won’t stop speaking till they come back,” she says. With 83 more classmates back and 113 more to go, these truly are times that try many souls.