What It's Like To Come Home After Fleeing From Boko Haram
Uwani Musa Dure, 25, is one of the scores of mostly women and children who fled Gwoza and have recently returned. Fati Abubakar/UNICEF
This is Uwani Musa Dure, 25. She fled her hometown Gwoza in Nigeria after the terror network Boko Haram claimed it as their headquarters in 2014. They’re gone and now she’s back. But life is not the same.
Musa Dure's 10-year-old son, Umaru, and eight-year-old daughter, Hadiza, were both abducted by the group, she says. Also missing are Musa Dure's mother, her brother Ibrahim and her sister Fadimatu, then 14. She says these family members were kidnapped.
Aerial view of Gwoza, a town in northeast NIgeria that was seized by Boko Haram in 2014. Fati Abubakar/UNICEF
And she is not sure of their fate. "When I came back after the town was liberated by the army, I heard from people that my mother was at the Giwa military barracks in Maiduguri, but that my children had died," Musa Dure says. "So I'm not sure what the reality is. But I'm determined to find them. I've been trying to locate my family for more than a year — to Yola, to Mubi, to Maiduguri, even to Kano — all over — looking for them."
It pains her to see other people with their families, she says. "I become so nostalgic, so sorrowful," she says. "I'm constantly thinking about my family members. I think about them so much that I can't even sleep at night. I feel faint sometimes, I feel desperate. We're tired of living like this. We are looking to God to make all this end."
Read the full story here
