Central and northern Nigeria have faced many years of brutal Fulani and Boko Haram attacks targeting Christian villages, entrenching poverty, causing many to become orphans and widows, and leaving com...
Central and northern Nigeria have faced many years of brutal Fulani and Boko Haram attacks targeting Christian villages, entrenching poverty, causing many to become orphans and widows, and leaving communities destitute and struggling to care for their children. Devastated communities are left in abject poverty, their homes and crops destroyed, facing a lack of medical services, and struggling with illness and malnutrition. Christian families are fleeing devastated areas, many having lost loved ones in the attacks.
VOM Australia’s mission partner runs a centre, that helps children of martyrs, by providing residential education (Christian, academic and vocational), medical care and a mentoring Christian environment. Here children receive training, equipping them to eventually return to extended families to rebuild their home regions and Christian communities.
“[The centre] works like a well-run African village where everyone, including children, is expected to help by completing chores and being responsible for each other. All the children are considered to be ‘our children’ with the centre community taking responsibility for them, according to the African proverb, “Children are for all of us”, our mission partners noted.
Two children who have recently come to the centre are two sisters, Hope and Nankus, aged eight and seven. They are the children of Pantong and Sarah, from a village in Mangu Local Government Area of Plateau State.
Mr Pantong was a farmer and in the dry season also mined tin and columbite ore for extra income. He was killed by Fulani herdsmen in 2017 when Nankus was just three months old. Kwaslele village was looted and burned to the ground by the armed Fulani, so Sarah and her infant daughters sought shelter in Sarah’s parent’s village. Their village was also attacked in June 2018, with Sarah’s three older brothers brutally killed by Fulani herdsmen. Sarah, her parents and the children fled to Jos. Since then, the girl’s mother, Sarah, has been struggling to provide for them.
Sarah eventually found work as a housemaid but still, she could not meet up with the demands of the family, so she came to our mission partner for help.
Hope and Nankus came into the centre on 27 October 2024. They are doing well and always happy, our partners report. Their mother and grandparents are thankful to God for this help, grateful that at last, the girls have a safe place to live, learn and grow, close by, where they can see them often.
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