A trauma care centre is being constructed in northern Nigeria to support Christians who have suffered religiously motivated violence or abuse at the hands of Boko Haram and Fulani herdsmen, it was announced in late November.
The centre is being built by Open Doors International, a charity which supports Christians under pressure for their faith. In April, the charity took a group of UK-based church leaders to visit the parents of the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls and Christians in internally displaced people (IDP) camps – in Yola in the north-eastern state of Adamawa, and Jos in the central state of Plateau.
On a hit list
During the trip, the group met with Isaac (name changed), a church leader who survived a Boko Haram attack. Isaac said he learnt that his name was on a Boko Haram list on Christmas Day 2015. A few days later, the Islamists moved from house to house, killing everyone they encountered, but Isaac and his family escaped unharmed. When his 500-strong church was due to meet again a few days later, Isaac, his wife and the caretaker were the only ones there.
‘As a shepherd, as a pastor, we don’t take pleasure in burying our members’, Isaac told the group. ‘I’ve seen orphans in the church and widows in the church. Whenever we see them, we feel bad, because we need to take care of them and we have no resources.’
Sleeping as attack came
The group also met with Valerie (name changed), a young mother in a village in Kaduna State, part of Nigeria’s Middle Belt. She was asleep when Fulani herdsmen attacked late one night. They killed many people, slaughtered animals and burned houses to the ground one by one. As people ran away, the Fulani followed and continued shooting and killing. Valerie stood by her door, trying to hold it shut. She was shot three times in her chest and stomach. Her husband was killed. Fifty people who were hiding in a straw house were locked inside and burnt to death. Two churches were also burnt down.
Valerie had previously spent 18 months in a refugee camp and had just returned home to pick up the pieces and start again.
Hearing the mothers’ stories
One of the visiting group, Dr David Muir, a lecturer at a London university, described how he felt after hearing such stories:
‘When you listen to some of the mothers of the kidnapped girls; when you hear the harrowing stories of mothers whose sons were killed in front of them by Boko Haram or by Fulani herdsmen; when you listen to fathers who are traumatised because they could not protect their families; when you see hundreds of orphaned children in a camp for families who have been forced to flee, with little prospect of education or being reunited with their families; when you listen to pastors who have buried hundreds of members of their congregation [who were] slaughtered in the Boko Haram insurgency, then you understand something about the hardships, struggles and challenges faced by Christians in Nigeria’, he said.
Over the last 150 years, the Christian population in Nigeria has grown from virtually nothing to 31.2 % of the 187 million inhabitants. But Nigeria is currently number 12 on Open Doors’ 2016 World Watch List, which ranks the 50 countries in which it is most difficult to live as a Christian.
