The Father's Have Gone into the Forest to Look for Their Daughters

Mother crying for her daughter

In the dead of the night on April 14th, 234 school girls in the northeastern town of Chibok in Borno State, Nigeria were kidnapped from their boarding school after being recalled to take a Physics exam. 43 girls have escaped, 187 girls remain missing according to the principle of the school.  All of the other schools in the region were closed amidst threats from terrorist organizations who are against education, especially the education of young girls. The prime suspects are Nigeria’s Islamic extremist rebels, known as Boko Haram, a violent group campaigning to establish an Islamic Shariah state in Nigeria, whose 170 million people are about half Muslim and half Christian. They are also responsible for multiple bombings in Abuja just prior to the mass abduction and have been implicated in abducting some girls and young women in attacks on schools, villages and towns but this mass kidnapping is unprecedented. Boko Haram is an enemy of education, in fact, the name Boko Haram in slang terms means “Western education is sinful.” The extremists have been known to use the young women as porters, cooks and sex slaves.


How did it happen? A group of men dressed like militia shot down guards and stormed into the girls' dormitory claiming to be government forces sent to rescue them. They loaded the girls on a truck and took them towards the forest, but some of the girls jumped off the back of the truck and escaped. There are also some reports of girls escaping from the forest. The Nigerian President, Goodluck Jonathan, has been criticized for not doing enough to ensure the speedy return of the girls back to their homes. Some of the difficulty lies in the geography of the region. The girls are being kept in a dense forest that makes a ground level attack difficult and given the fact that the girls are hostages, an aerial attack is dangerous.

Some of the fathers and brothers of the girls hopped on motorcycles and headed into the forest in search of the girls. They followed the tracks of the kidnappers up to Baale village, where villagers told them the gunmen had passed through "and were camped with the girls in a creek some hundreds of meters outside the village." The villagers gave account that some of the girls had even been brought back to the village at gunpoint to fetch water. One of the fathers told CNN, "we were warned by residents of Baale not to proceed, saying they feared for our lives because our sticks and (outdated) guns were no match for the heavy arms of the Boko Haram gunmen," he explained. "The villagers warned us we would all be killed if we dared face the gunmen and would put the lives of our daughters in danger. We have therefore abandoned the search for our daughters since we know where they are but we don't have the capacity to liberate them," Mark added.

Perhaps these girls wanted to be Scientists or Doctors or Engineers or Mathematicians. Now they may be sex slaves. God forbid.

This is a very difficult to post to write because it appears that the situation is helpless. It appears that there is nothing that we can do in our own corner of the world while the girls are being entrapped and enslaved in another small, dark, heavily guarded corner of the world. But such is not the case. We can pray for their safe return and we can try and bring as much media attention to this as possible by staying informed and spreading the word. The brighter the light that shines on this situation the more heat the government will feel to ensure the girls are returned home safely. According to NPR, activists in Nigeria are plannig a million-women march on Abuja this Wednesday to demand their rescue.

Free. People. Everywhere.


Do you think the media is doing a good job covering this topic?