I wish I had bought a phone for my daughter – Chibok parent

A’isha and her colleagues were taken by suspected Boko Haram gunmen on April 14. Since then, about 53 girls had escaped and reunited with their families.A’isha is not among the lucky ones. She, along with more than 200 other abducted girls, is still in Boko Haram captivity. About 130 of them were shown in a […]

A’isha and her colleagues were taken by suspected Boko Haram gunmen on April 14. Since then, about 53 girls had escaped and reunited with their families.
A’isha is not among the lucky ones. She, along with more than 200 other abducted girls, is still in Boko Haram captivity. About 130 of them were shown in a video released by the sect last week.
Some of the girls who escaped were said to have jumped out of the vehicles in which they were being taken away, following telephone conversations they had with their parents.
“If I had known, I would have bought a phone for her like other parents,” Zanna told Daily Trust in Chibok.
“If she had a phone, she would have called me when she was being taken away and I would have told her to jump off the vehicle they were using to take her away as some other parents did.”
The stout, dark man didn’t allow her to own a phone because he wanted to protect her from the distraction it could cause for the daughter he was hoping would become a medical doctor in the future.
Even a month after his daughter’s abduction, Zanna still looks into the razed dormitories where his daughter and her schoolmates used to stay as if looking for her.
“The girl’s clothes are in there,” he said, pointing at the guard’s room by the gate of the school.
They comprise school uniforms and personal wears the girls were asked to leave behind by their abductors.
“I packed them in here the morning after,” the old slim guard referred to as Alanguburo said.
Few kilometers away from the school, Zanna peeps into a burnt vehicle just by Chibok-Maiduguri road. He went further away from the road pointing at two other burnt vehicles.
“They burnt down these ones when they broke down,” he said.
Soon after the abduction, parents, including Zanna, organised and followed the trail with the hope of finding their daughters.
“Following this direction,” he pointed toward where the girls’ abductors branched off the Chibok-Maiduguri road, “we entered Pin, Balakle, Kombi then Kaya. When we got there, the policemen who went with us went back.”
The parents went back the next day hoping to get back their daughter even when the police didn’t turn up for the search. This time around they went as far as the edge of the dreaded Sambisa Forest, where the girls are believed to be held.
But their courage was broken by villagers near the area who warned that the people holding their daughters were well armed and could kill all of them.
Zanna and the others had no choice but to return home.
Going back home again without his daughter, Zanna went through streets of Chibok where everything seemed normal apart from the building razed by the militants that visited the village about a month ago.
But the sign that all was not well appeared when he brought out the picture of his daughter, A’isha. His wife Talatu, who had looked calm and composed all the while, broke into tears.
“I don’t have anything to say,” she sobbed, in response to questions about her daughter and her message to the abductors.
She wrapped her face in her hijab wiping her tears. A’isha’s one-and-half-year-old little sister was beside her, oblivious of the pain her parents are going through.
Her father showed her Aisha’s picture asking her to play with it.
“Let’s leave everything to God,” Zanna told his wife.