Nigeria Girl Who Escaped Boko Haram: I'm Now Terrified of School

One of the teenagers who escaped from Islamist extremists who abducted more than 300 schoolgirls says the kidnapping was "too terrifying for words," and she is now scared to go back to school.

Sarah Lawan, a 19-year-old science student, told The Associated Press that more of the girls could have escaped but that they were frightened by their captors' threats to shoot them.

She spoke in the local Hausa language in a phone interview from Chibok, her home and the site of the mass abduction in northeast Nigeria. #Bringbackourgirls

The failure to rescue those who remain captive four weeks later has attracted mounting national and international outrage. Last week, Nigeria was forced to accept international help in the search, after ignoring offers for weeks.

More experts are expected in #Nigeria to help rescue the girls, including U.S. hostage negotiators and others from Britain, #France, China and Spain.

"I am pained that my other colleagues could not summon the courage to run away with me," Lawan said. "Now I cry each time I come across their parents and see how they weep when they see me."

Police say 53 students have escaped. Nigeria's homegrown Boko Haram terrorist network is threatening to sell those who remain in captivity into slavery.

Washington last year put a $7 million ransom on the head of Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau, who said in a video last week that he will sell the girls into slavery.

Lawan said other girls who escaped later have told her that the abductors spoke of their plans to marry them.

She said the thought of going back to school terrifies her — either the burned out ruins of Chibok Government Girls Secondary School or any other school. But it will have to be done if she is to realize her dream of studying law.

"I am really scared to go back there; but I have no option if I am asked to go because I need to finish my final year exams which were stopped half way through," she said.

Source: NBC News

A Mother’s Love: Stories of Struggle, Sacrifice, Love and Wisdom

Journalist Alysia Steele’s explores the “jewels in the #Mississippi Delta” who held it down for their families through decades of strife and racial struggle. 

Leola Dillard, 102

It’s #Mother’s Day weekend and many of us may feel the keen absence of the women who meant the most to us.

How many times have you wished you could turn back the hands of time and have one more conversation with one of the most influential women of your life? Maybe have notes of memorable anecdotes they shared?

This was one of Alysia Steele’s biggest regrets concerning her paternal grandmother, Althenia A. Burton, who died 20 years ago. Since then, the memory of her grandmother has stayed with Steele, never fading, and ultimately culminating in the conception of her current project, a book proposal, Jewels in the Delta, that has gained interest from publishers.

“I have a huge sense of regret that as a trained journalist I never had the foresight to get her story and I’ll never hear her voice again and I can’t even tell you how much that hurts me,” Steele tells The Root.

Annyce Campbell, 90

Steele has interviewed about 47 women; and is conducting the last of what will be a total of 50 interviews in the coming days. The project has taken her approximately 11 months to complete and countless hours of recording, transcribing, coaxing and traveling. It’s been hard work to be sure, but to Steele the end goal has been more than worth it.

“How many of us stop and talk to our grandparents to get to their stories? To really ask them the questions that are hard?” she adds. #Mother'sDay

“[These women] deserve some recognition,” she says. “You think about the big stories that went nationwide and abroad, but there are challenges that everyday people faced that aren’t being told ... and I wanted to pay respect to those women who held it down.”

Katie Richardson, 87

So Steele set about looking for older church mothers, much like her grandmother, in her adopted hometown of #Oxford, Miss., where she teaches at the University of Mississippi, to uncover the stories of these “jewels,” and share them with the world in text and black-and-white photos.

“There are so many churches down here, little white churches on the side of the road, and I started wondering about those churches and who goes to them,” Steele says. “I just started thinking about my grandmother and what she’d think about me living in Mississippi, a state with such a harsh history of race ... I guess I just wanted to bring a part of her back to me.”

Approaching these dignified ladies wasn’t an easy task. People in the Delta aren’t known for being particularly welcoming to strangers, Steele acknowledged, laughing. She had to put in a lot of time, building relationships with various pastors of different churches, who first interviewed her and sought out her intentions with these women. Then she had to approach the women several times, coaxing them, before they finally agreed to share their remarkable stories with her.

Lela Bearden, 88

There’s Leola Dillard, the 102-year-old gem who refused to let her daughters pick cotton while she worked on a plantation in Yazoo City. Dillard was told that if her children went to school, she would have to leave the land because she would “ruin all his other blacks because they would want to send their children to school too.”

Dillard chose to leave. Now all her girls have master’s degrees and one obtained her Ph.D.

Lillie Jackson was married to Champ Jackson. That may mean nothing at first ... but Champ Jackson was the funeral home director who prepared Emmitt Till’s body in 1955.

In an excerpt from Steele’s book proposal, Virginia Hower, 93, shared how she “felt dirty” because of her ability to pass for white in a segregated society.

“It was horror. You felt bad because you couldn’t be with your grandmother or your grandfather. You just accepted it. I couldn’t be with them because they were darker. Sometimes you felt bad because you could ride in a clean coach and just to think that your grandmother couldn’t kiss you as you stepped off the train. But they accepted it, so why not enjoy the clean train? And then when I got down on the streets, we all kiss and carry on. Those was happy moments. And then you got to thinkin’ how foolish this life is, how foolish. Then you got to thinkin’ about it and say take advantage of it and a lot of people down here in Clarksdale, they went to Chicago in ’41 and never revealed they were colored.”

Virginia Hower, 93

So many fascinating stories from unassuming women who had nothing but love for their respective husbands and children and never really spoke about the troubles and trials they had endured.

As Velma Moore explained to Steele:

"If you gonna marry somebody, you supposed to marry them—you said ’til death do us apart. You hang there. It’s gonna be dark days, light days, but you supposed to hang there until death do you apart. And I always say, Lord, I want one husband, I want all of my children to be by that one man and God fixed it so. We got 15 heads, that’s the first man I married, never been married no more and never will. No, I will not. And I got 15 children by that one man and I thank God. And I did just like He say. We was not divorced. I’m still Mrs. Moore. I be Mrs. Moore until I’m dead and gone and I’ll still be Mrs. Moore."

Lillie Jackson always put her children before all else:

“A mother’s love? She tried to teach her children the right way to go. Bring ‘em up in church and you love them and you try to do the best you can, what a mother supposed to do. I loved my kids up until now. Don’t nothin’ come before my kids. My kids always come first. If I had food and I didn’t have enough, I would let them eat first. If they left anything, I’d eat. If they didn’t, I would just wait until next time.”

For Steele, 44, it was a joy being able to give these elderly women a voice, to show a side of them that few people—sometimes not even their families—knew.

“I’m very honored that women I don’t know have allowed me to come into their lives and just tell a portion of their stories and it’s very gratifying because the grandchildren or the daughters sit in and listen and often say ‘I didn’t know about that,’ and so there’s a bond that trickles down to them that makes this all the more worthwhile, and I know that I’ve done something good when the mothers get emotional or cry when I read their words back to them and so that’s a wonderful feeling that they can appreciate what they said,” Steele tells The Root.

As for the poignant photos that will illustrate this proposed book, Steele hopes that they will help anyone from any background to be able to relate to any single story.

Alma B. Tucker, 79

 "I hope that people of all races and backgrounds will find it interesting, these stories, because they think they touch across several aspects of humanity: falling in love, working under hard conditions, new points of education, having self-esteem,” Steele says. “So I think there’s a story for everybody.”

 Source: The Root

Terror in Library

Photo by Hassan Afzal

This is not the usual tale of terror. Terror’s usual ingredients, the explosion, the recovered head and the severed limbs; the bits and pieces of human flesh are not present here.
It begins in a library and not the one that has been named after al Qaeda chief, Osama Bin Laden. Those sorts of terrors have developed their own digestive mechanisms within the Pakistani media, for the one discussed here, there is still no vocabulary.

The venue for this terror is one the largest state-run universities in Punjab. Thousands pin their hopes on institutions like this one, clamoring to get in, cramming for exams, hoping for jobs.
On the #University’s many campuses, all pictured green lawned and well-manicured on the website, are thousands of female students. They are said to be doing far better than their male counterparts, but there are few studies to prove it.
The truths of female superiority are not ones that get much nurturing in Pakistan. The #girls are nevertheless there, different numbers adopting different strategies of survival on a co-educational campus in an increasingly segregated country.
Some wear scowls and sullen expressions, others swathe themselves in yards of fabric; whatever works to eke out an education. Theirs are the paths of delicate compromises; with reluctant parents, with crowing clerics, with harassing male students and with apathetic administrations

With these burdens as the background, one young #female student at the University campus made her way to the library for the Institute of Social and #Cultural Studies.
It was an ordinary autumn day and she was an ordinary girl. As is the case with many students, she needed research materials. A paper was due and she had to find sources to cite; materials she assumed, would be available at the library.
With this simple errand in mind, she approached one of the staff members at the facility. He told her that most of the books in the library were kept on the second floor and on the other side of the facility. She went with him.There, he sexually assaulted her.
In this tale of terror, the victim dies a living death. If she goes to the University Administration, she will have to reveal her identity. If her identity is revealed, she will be, as all rape victims are in Pakistan, dragged through the coals of dishonor and blame. The law on the books demands that she produce four witnesses to validate the crime; an impossibility in her case as it is in many others.
Then, there are the cautionary tales of female college students who have spoken out. The last girl raped on her way to college earlier this year, #burned herself alive outside a police station. Each and every one of her rapists had been set free. There are too many stories like hers, and every girl in Pakistan knows them.

This other terror, which lurks in libraries, in unfrequented corners of busy offices, is negotiated through the constrictions of threats and shame and fear is worse than the loud and visible conflagration of shootings and bombings.
It lurks unseen, eating from within the innards of a country that denies all that it cannot see. The choices before the girls of #Pakistan are all bad ones; speaking up insures only greater punishments, staying silent means dying inside/
In never being able to tell their stories, they remain isolated, each victim of the demonic librarian, the lecherous boss and the criminal professor condemned to never knowing how many hundreds more are suffering from the same inflictions.
In the disbelief of the nation is every rapists’ first victory, the second is in the confidence of knowing that if any woman decides to speak up, she will be killed again, this time by the consensus of the whole country.
Source: Dawn News Article