Chibok Escapees Defy Militants By Returning To School

It was an opportunity but yet a risk as some chibok girls who escaped Boko Haram insurgency, defied the militants by returning to school.

But wait a minute! Do you what to know how this transpired? Do you want to know how 2 young women who escaped were left grasping to make sense of their new reality? Do you want to know who their rescuers are? If the answer to all these questions is a YES! Worry no more as you have all the answers you need in this report below.

Reality Dawns On Chibok Escapees
Months after a terrorist group, Boko Haram shocked the world by kidnapping more than 200 school girls, a small group of schoolgirls who narrowly escaped were left grasping to make sense of their new reality (Going back to school).

The Islamic group had warned they would shoot anyone trying to escape. But as the truck full of frightened schoolgirls sped deeper into Boko Haram’s territory, two sisters clutched hands and jumped off together into the night.

But that was only just the beginning of a terrifying experience these sister were about to embark on.
 

 Now, they held hands once again as they faced another terrifying prospect: returning to school.
Names, Asabe and Ruth evaded the fate of 219 of their classmates in the north-eastern Nigerian village of Chibok who are still in captivity. However, the two sisters would never have known that a day would come were one would have to decide the fate of the other.

Chibok girls

The mass abduction last April propelled the North region of Nigeria into global dishonor, as the missing students became an international symbol of Boko Haram’s intensifying war against education.
But, far from the limelight, these young women who escaped were left grasping to make sense of their new reality.

They could not shake off the fear the militants would return for them some day.
By day, they roamed for miles under the unforgiving sun so they would not be around if the men with machine guns leaped in again.

But in a dramatic twist, one late August afternoon, a stranger showed up at Asabe and Ruth’s tin-roof home offering a scholarship to study in Yola, the capital of a neighbouring state.

An American University security guard named Godiya was the visitor on that fateful day.
But the major problem wouldn’t be the fear of Boko Haram, but the acceptance of what Ms Godiya was about to propose would be a brazen act of defiance against Boko Haram.

But just as Asabe and Ruth were faced with maybe a little problem, little did one know that Godiya also had one major issue which was also troubling her.

“The problem was I had only one scholarship, and their father said he couldn’t choose between his two daughters. Nobody could decide,” Godiya recalled.

You’d recall that the sect had repeatedly warned the students they would kill the families of those who continued schooling. Now here lies the problem for Asabe and Ruth; continuity or stagnancy?
Finally, Godiya tore two leaves of paper from her notebook. On one she wrote: “Go to American University of Nigeria”; on the other: “Wait for another chance”. She folded them behind her back and waited for the young women, who sat silently holding hands, to make a choice.

What Asabe and Ruth also didn’t know about Godiya not until that day was that, she is not only a slim, quietly-spoken 27-year-old lady, but she is also a sister to one of the 57 schoolgirls that escaped Boko Haram’s captivity.

But just as Asabe, Ruth and their father was contemplating on who to wait a year and who goes back to school, a certain Ms Margee Ensign steps in.

Godiya made a decision then. She approached her boss at the American University of Nigeria in Yola, Margee Ensign, an energetic, cheerful woman who has run the establishment for six years.
“She came into my office and, really quietly, she told me that her sister was one of the girls who had escaped, and she and all the other girls were just there in Chibok, doing nothing,” Ensign recalled. Could anything be done to help them?



Days after her visit to Ms Ensign, an exhausted, Godiya visited Asabe and Ruth, the two sisters, on the 10th day.

However, back in Yola, Godiya’s boss Ensign heard about the two sisters’ dilemma and called their father. “You don’t have to choose,” she told him. “We’ll raise the money to take both your girls.”
On the night of April 14, 2014 more than 200 school girls were abducted inside their school hostel in Chibok, Borno State. The schoolgirls were asleep at their boarding school in Chibok when they were woken by the noise of movement in the school. A group of armed men, posing as soldiers, told the students to go outside into waiting trucks, so they could be “rescued.”

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