Light, love and laughter have come into their lives; leaving little indication that Charity and her three children are survivors of a Boko Haram attack. In their remote village of Guyaku, in northern Nigeria, being a Christian comes with significant risk. Over the past few years, violent attacks by Boko Haram and other Islamic extremist groups have become all too common in the country’s north, and Middle Belt. In these attacks, Christians are often murdered or have their property and means of livelihood destroyed. Charity and her children know this firsthand because they have lost family members in incidents of militia activity.
The night of the attack
Charity was in the bathroom, cleaning up for the evening, when her brother came running in the house, ‘Put out the light! put out the light!’ he had shouted in hushed tones. “That was the moment we found out Boko Haram was attacking our village,” Charity says. She grabbed her youngest daughter and quickly placed her on her back in a wrap. “I was scared,” her son, Theophilus recalls. “I thought that we wouldn’t survive. So, I grabbed my sister’s hand, and we ran.”
“It was at that time that we ran away towards the mountains,” Charity says. “We were heading in the same direction when a motorbike came toward us. That was how I got separated from my children. I went with my little girl, and my son ran in a different direction with his sister.” Charity ran towards the mouth of a cave and darted inside for shelter with others from the village. The night in the cave was long. Finally, when day broke, everyone was quiet and shuffled cautiously out of the cave and started to walk back to the village to view the damage. On her way back, Charity heard that Boko Haram had killed some of her family members in the attack. It was devastating news, and all she could think about at that moment was her two older children. She was unsure where they were. Weeks went by with no news, and fear overtook the village. There was no cell service, and many thought the roads were too dangerous to travel.
Looking to the future after fear and loss
“When I arrived home, I didn’t see my children,” Charity recalls. “I couldn’t even eat food or drink water throughout the day because there was no taste, and I was thinking if I drink this water and eat this food and my children are dead, of what use is the food to me?” One day, alone in the house where they had been living with her mother, doing some chores, Charity heard her son calling out her name. When she looked out her front door, she saw her son and daughter walking toward her. “I was so shocked and excited as I shouted their names!” Charity shares. “Seeing my children felt like a new dawn—everything changed because my lost children were back.”
“We shed tears of joy,” Theophilus says. The reunion was a profoundly moving answer to prayer. “But soon after all the joy and laughter, we started remembering the fact that some of our family members had died,” Charity shares. “So, we went to console our family members and mourned our loved ones. But I was greatly comforted because I saw my children were alive.”
The struggle for Charity and her children however wasn’t over. In many ways, it was just beginning. They needed to rebuild their homes, find food and shelter, restore their churches from the ashes, replant crops and
deal with the ongoing anxiety that Boko Haram was still out there.
Charity’s story represents thousands of persecuted Christians across Nigeria who are left to pick up the pieces after violent religious attacks by extremists like Boko Haram. For brave believers like Charity, staying in her village means keeping a light for Christ shining bright in the region—even when the darkness surrounds it.
