Inside the lives of Jos orphans

Ten-year-old Shema’u Bilal is trying to move on with life in the wake of the devastation of the Jos crisis that has robbed her of her childhood and left her an orphan after her parents were murdered in cold blood in the wave of sectarian crisis that has hit the state in recent times. Shema’u’s […]

Ten-year-old Shema’u Bilal is trying to move on with life in the wake of the devastation of the Jos crisis that has robbed her of her childhood and left her an orphan after her parents were murdered in cold blood in the wave of sectarian crisis that has hit the state in recent times. Shema’u’s eyes now carry the unmistakable sparkle of joy which in a child so young masked the horror of her experiences as a displaced person left to battle disease, hunger, extreme deprivation and a bleak future without the hope of attending school and acquiring education.
Now the ten-year-old is in the clouds ever since an NGO offered her a fresh start in life through a scholarship where she now has the opportunity of picking up her education from class four, the grade she was in earlier before the crisis put a huge bump on the road to her progress. “It was very difficult without my parents to help,” she says with the shyness of a girl just recovering some of the wide-eyed magic of childhood.
The group helping to restore some of that magic to a battered childhood whose innocence was not spared the hatred of ethnic supremacists, who resorted to bloodbath to settle their differences, leaving thousands of orphans in their wake, is the Awareness for Educational Development Initiative (AWEDI) who few days ago doled out about N5.5 million to thirty orphans, including Shema’u. “This is as an effort to ensure that these orphans become productive in the society instead of allowing them to become a liability; that is why we are empowering them educationally,” Executive Director, AWEDI, Ash-Sheikh Muhammad Suleiman Adam says.
AWEDI’s intervention is a mere widow’s might in an ocean of devastation where the threat facing the orphans include disease, homelessness, permanent displacement and the traumatic scars of living with the memory of parents who were hacked brutally to death, sometimes in the presence of their children, in a crisis that has defied all attempts at finding a permanent solution.
Some of the children orphaned by the crisis now live in temporary camps as refugees in their homeland.  Between January and October this year, about fifteen people have died in the Jos camp from diseases like malaria, typhoid fever and pneumonia, said the leader of the camp, Sa’idu Bala in an earlier interview with Weekly Trust. The deaths include children.
The orphans roam in the camps with no provisions for toilets and bathrooms. What serves as a bathroom is a zinc demarcation that provides some modicum of privacy in the open fields of the camp. Save the Children, an international NGO, had warned that there are strong indications that the displaced persons “need direct support for a period of time.”
Even though the vital support that could help allay the problems of shelter, food and proper hygiene are absent from the camp, 13-year-old Anas Sa’idu who wants to be a lawyer when he grows up says he will strive hard to achieve his goal now that he has an opportunity to go to school. Like Shema’u, the innocence of his gratitude for an opportunity to continue his education is quite touching and sometimes heartbreaking when one considers that just last year most of these orphans were school pupils living normal lives before the crisis cut short their bliss and made the things they took for granted, like going to school, unattainable.
Sadiya Mamuda Jibrin, 18, a resident of Anglo Jos, embodies the spirit of the despair that engulfs the orphans once their parents are no longer alive to support their progress in life. Ever since she lost her father in 2001 in one of the crises that would later become more frequent and more violent with the passage of the years, life has not been the same for her. “It is a bad experience no one will like,” she says with the wisdom of a teenager forced to confront some of the painful realities of life’s unfairness. Sadiya, who is a final year secondary school student, was not sure she could further her education because the money she needed to buy the forms for the SSCE examinations was not forthcoming. Now, she says, “I am so happy because this scholarship will allow me to see through my education as I am now in form six and about to write my SSCE.”
Adam says what the orphans need is not assistance that would leave them perpetually dependent, but an opportunity to achieve financial freedom in the future. He says: “Relief is generally a short-term solution to a long-term problem. Self-employment through economic, educational and social change is a long-term solution.”
While such help is coming in trickles, the displaced status of the orphans, most of whom are, practically refugees, makes interventions on their behalf near-impossible. A case in point is the camp in Tilden Fulani in Bauchi where there are over 60 orphans. Only very few of them were able to be picked up for assistance in acquiring education by the group because they don’t have a home, as the camp condition is quite terrible. The solution, Adam says, is to build orphanages where such children could be taken care of and given an opportunity to continue with their studies.
Matter of fact, shelter tops the handicaps that make it difficult to provide help to the orphans. In the Jos camp, the orphans and some of the refugees seeking shelter in the shops they have converted into homes are under threat of eviction as they have been issued with a quit notice by the owner of the shop who says he wants to give it out to traders. On the average, seven to ten people live in a shop/room. This new threat looks set to compound an already dire situation where, earlier, most of the orphans who came to the camp came without their school uniforms because they have been lost in the crisis.
The story of the orphans puts into relief the shattered dreams of children, most of whom when spoken to say they want to become medical doctors, lawyers, engineers and the like. Those fortunate among them to get an opportunity to go back to school cannot help counting their blessings. Zulaihatu Ibrahim, 17, says of the assistance, “This is an opportunity for me to achieve my ambition, because I have been dreaming of become a doctor all my life.” She was all smiles. For Nusaiba Musa, a Primary Three pupil who could not tell her age, all she managed was a smile.
Ruqayyatu Muhammad Aliyu, one of the custodians of the orphans says, “Words cannot describe how I feel, especially about the girls who are already in a disadvantaged position to acquire education when you compare them with their male counterparts. Our hope is that the children are given priority in a competitive society such as the one we are in.”