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EDITOR IN CHIEF- ABDULLAH BIN SALIM AL SHUEILI

Nigeria’s lost kids hope to find families again

nigeria-rfl-08-12-2015-08
nigeria-rfl-08-12-2015-08
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Over 30,000 children have lost or been separated from their parents during an insurgency which has left nearly two million people uprooted after fleeing Boko Haram.  


Kieran Guilbert -


Running his fingers over the wide scars on his knee and thigh, 13-year-old Usman recalled the moment he thought he would die.


The boy was fleeing a Boko Haram attack on his village in northeast Nigeria with his mother last year when two militants knocked him to the ground, and approached him wielding knives.


“I was scared that I would die ... that I would never see my mother again,” said Usman, explaining how he limped to a nearby camp for the displaced in Bama town in Borno state.


For two months, Usman heard nothing about his mother until two aid workers brought good news. They had tracked her down to her brother’s house in the nearby city of Maiduguri.


More than 30,000 children like Usman have lost or been separated from their parents during an insurgency which has left nearly two million people uprooted after fleeing Boko Haram.


While two-thirds of these children are being cared for by a relative, the remainder — around 10,000 — are forced to fend for themselves, according to the UN children’s agency (UNICEF).


With many of them relying on the help of local communities or displaced families to survive, aid workers are striving to reunite these children with their parents.


But tracing and tracking down relatives can take several months — leaving them prey to child marriage, sexual abuse and forced labour, aid agencies say.


“Children may even resort to begging, hawking and transactional sex to survive,” said Rachel Harvey, chief of child protection for UNICEF.


When children arrive in a camp or community without their parents, or alone, they are quickly referred to local aid groups which carry out family tracing and reunification programmes.


Aid workers and volunteers take down as many details as possible from the children and share the information with their colleagues across northeast Nigeria, who go from camp to camp, community to community, reading out names and following leads.


But with three-quarters of the 1.8 million people displaced by Boko Haram living in communities across six states, rather than in camps, the work can be arduous and time-consuming, said Myriem El Khatib of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).


““Outside of the camps, the displacement pattern is more random, and there are many areas which we still cannot access due to the insurgency. The average process takes many months.”


Even when parents or relatives are tracked down and told about their children, reuniting them is not simple.


The makeshift foster families and caregivers who look after unaccompanied children may refuse to let them go, according to the Centre for Community Health and Development (CHAD).


Some people send the children to work or attempt to marry them off for money, while others hope having another child under their care will result in more humanitarian aid, said Shadrach Adawara, family tracing and reunification officer for CHAD.


Aid workers regularly check up on reunited children and refer them to services from healthcare to psychosocial support.


In some cases, children may decide not to go back to their parents or relatives, several tracing officers said.


They may have suffered abuse or had been forced to work by their parents, or decide to spare their struggling families the added burden.


When 17-year-old Fatima, a former Boko Haram captive who escaped after two years while heavily pregnant, was reunited with her mother, they could not stop crying and hugging — having presumed each dead for so long.


But Fatima soon realised she and her baby could not stay with her mother and younger siblings in her hometown of Monguno.


“I saw the poverty, and many responsibilities of my mother ... and decided it would be better to live with my older brother in this (Bakassi) IDP camp,” Fatima said, cradling her two-year-old to sleep. — Thomson Reuters Foundation


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