Hawu opened her phone and began
to cry. Her sister, Aisha, was smiling at her from the photo folder. She could
not smile back. It was not going to be real.
Aisha A-Deri is one of the 105
girls declared missing after suspected Boko Haram insurgents attacked
Government Girls Technical College, Dapchi, on Monday. It’s been five days now
since the attack and the girls are yet to be found.
Dapchi, a once quiet, relatively
safe town in Bursari local government area of Yobe state, has been thrown into
mourning ever since. The families of over a hundred girls have refused to be
consoled. They cannot sleep or eat. They do not want money. They do not want
empty promises. Only one thing will dry their tears now – the safe return of
their girls.
Though President Muhammadu Buhari
has deployed troops to search and rescue the girls, that hasn’t done much to
ease their pain.
Kawu, the older sister of Aisha,
the 13-year-old , SS1 student of the school, says in a whatsapp message
soliciting help from anyone in search of her sister: “We are having sleepless
nights and smiles have been stolen from our faces. We the whole family are
incomplete without you since your disappearance.”
Her message, which aptly conveys
the agony in their hearts, reads: “Ummee, when will you be back to us again, to
see that your smiling face, calmness, active response to messages and your love
for pictures in our phones?”
“Or is that why you prefer to be
most in the pictures in our phones knowing that you are going to be missed
sometime? If that is the case, missing you is not our wish. Please come back
home. May Allah bring you and the rest of your colleagues back to your
respective families.”
TheCable called her step-mother
who was too grieved to speak, but handed the phone to her step-brother,
Kachalla A-Deri. With a voice laced with
regret, he says Aisha would have narrowly missed the unfortunate incident had
she not been taken back to school a day earlier.
“She had been at home for one
week because she was ill. The school told her to go and receive treatment at
home. It was on that Sunday evening, at about 6pm, that we took her back to
school, and the attack was on Monday evening,” he says.
According to Kachalla, several of
the girls who escaped ran into bushes, hid in tree trunks, but some ran into
vehicles suspected to belong to the insurgents.
Fondly called Ummee, which means
“motherly”, Aisha is the second daughter from her mother and the sixth from her
father.
Her father, Kadau A-Deri, tells
TheCable that it was a safe town, but they (inhabitants of Dapchi) observed
that all the security posts in the town were withdrawn three weeks prior to the
incident.
“It is as if they (Boko Haram)
are watching. Once the security is removed, they attacked the school,” he says,
“I am very, very sad. But I am
still expecting her to come back in sha Allah. She is a child of good
character. She always says she when she completes her secondary school, she
will further her studies. She said she wants to be a teacher or a nurse.”
But all that ambition seems to
have been temporarily stolen from her now, until at least her return, which is
highly anticipated, will be soon.
Boko Haram, which forbids western
education, has been attacking schools in the bid to press home their point.
Between 2013 to April 2014 alone, they attacked up to six schools in Yobe and
Chibok in Borno state.
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