A refuge for displaced children

Front view of the special children’s home

The Stephen Centre International (SCI) is home to 300 children who have lost one or both parents to the various ethnic, political and religious crises that have rocked Nigeria. Where two elephants fight, as the saying goes, it is the grass that suffers. OSEYIZA OOGBODO was at ‘the home for Nigeria’s special children’ and reports that in this case, the proverbial grass is wellnurtured.

A first-time passerby at the Aregbe Obantoko Area of Abeokuta, Ogun State, host community of the Stephen Centre International (SCI) is apt to wonder what the place is all about. Most definitely the individual would want to know more about it since one of its signboards proclaims it a home for Nigeria’s special children. Who are Nigeria’s special children?

Are they the physically or mentally challenged, orphans or children living with HIV/AIDS? These are the questions that could possibly assail the mind of the individual as he or she gazes at the structure so named. While there is no doubt that all the above-mentioned categories of children are special in their own way, SCI’s special children are those “who are victims of the several religious riots and other crises in Nigeria’s north especially.” This set of children is considered special by SCI because they have lost one or both parents to the violent crises. They are children who have definitely lost their fathers, who are regarded as the family breadwinners, to crises.

These children are the ones for which SCI exists. Whenever SCI spots them by seeking them out after violent crises, it brings them to SCI and provides them with totally free boarding, clothing, food and education up to high school level. SCI’s founder, Isaac Oluwole Newton Wusu, is a realistic person who admits “it is just a fraction of such children that we have here. There are many more of them that we can’t take in. We currently have 300 of them, so you can imagine how many more are out there.”

Meeting the children in SCI and asking them to recount their traumatic experiences will certainly evoke pity in you. Some of them actually witnessed the death of their father, mother, siblings or other loved ones. Nankpak Kumzwam is one such child. His mother, younger brother and sister were killed in his presence. Though he didn’t actually witness the whole gory episode with his eyes, as they were shot, he knows how it happened as he was also brutally cut by the machete of his family’s killer.

He carries the scars of his machete cuts with him wherever he goes, reminding him that he once had a family he will never see again, reminding him of his close shave death with death at a very tender age. He remembers vividly that it was in 2002 and a riot had begun again in the Wase community where he resided with his parents and siblings in Jos, the Plateau State capital. Houses were being burnt, people killed and Nankpak’s father aided his family to run away into the forest while he stayed back to prevent the marauders from catching up with them. That was in the night. When morning came, one of their bloodthirsty assailants accosted them in the forest and ordered them all to lie face down in readiness for death.

In cold blood, the man took a machete to them and left afterwards, believing he had killed them all. He didn’t know Nankpak was saved though because his mother laid down on him, shielding him with her body. Fear had also paralysed him so he couldn’t move. Many hours after, he came to himself with the realisation that he was alive. He pushed off his mother’s body and staggered in a daze back into town. A neighbour put him up and he got to know that his father had also been killed.

Later, SCI came for him. Blessing Justin also came to the notice of SCI after her father’s grisly death during the Zango Kataf riots in 2000. Her father was an Igbo man and pastor, but he lived and worked in Kaduna where Blessing was born. Though she was just six years old in 2000, she recalls that: “On the Thursday before the riot started, our teacher told us not to come to school on Friday. When we got home, we passed the information to our parents.”

Her father did not however heed the subtle warning. He went out on the Friday and never came back. His wife was pregnant at the time and she found it difficult to tell Blessing the truth. Even though she couldn’t grasp the true situation of what was really going on, Blessing kept asking for her father. “My mother had to tell me that my father had travelled,” Blessing recalls still. The story that Tanko Ibrahim tells of his own experience is very poignant. In 2002 in Kaduna, there was a riot and he and his mother and other siblings hid in the forest, surviving on wild fruits, leaves and suchlike. They came out of the forest after six weeks when the rioting had subsided and just didn’t have the means to get to their intended destination, their father’s village.

“As we waited on the roadside, unsure of what to do to get to my father’s village, a man, whose face was averted, and was clothed in a white babanriga and driving a white car stopped beside us and gave my mother money. When we moved forward and looked back after boarding a bus, we didn’t see the car again, and it didn’t pass us neither was it going in the opposite direction. It just disappeared. That man was my late father who was killed in an earlier crisis,” Tanko finished sadly.

Getting the children to come to SCI is not a piece of cake, Wusu disclosed. “Most bereaved mothers were initially scared of releasing their children to us. I brought the first set of 8 children in 2000 and it was quite a tough job of work convincing their mothers to let them go. When one mother was proving particularly adamant, another now told her that the children came from God and she sees giving her child to me like giving it back to God. That was when the adamant one now released her child too.”

Adua Bitrus wishes to be a lawyer. “I want to study law. I like argument. I like anything that involves argument.” Nonetheless his great dream now of wanting to be a lawyer, has been made feasible by his free SCI education; he didn’t want to come to SCI because he didn’t want to leave his mother since he wasn’t seeing his father again. His mother had to employ several tactics to change his mind. “She told me that I was going to America to study, that America is a beautiful and peaceful country in which every young man would want to study as it is better than northern Nigeria. Eventually, I decided to go to America. But between Kaduna and Abeokuta, I saw bush upon bush.

When we reached a town, I would think that the journey had ended, that we have reached America, and then the journey would continue again until we got to Abeokuta.” Before they got to Abeokuta, Adua had convinced himself that he was really going to America, because he saw so many beautiful buildings he had never seen before. But “the first thing that made me know I wasn’t in America was the language. I started crying and decided that I must go back immediately to meet my mother, but I had no money. With time, I settled down to study and forgot all about going to America, even though I knew I wasn’t in America.”

Luckily for Adua, he has had the opportunity to travel out through SCI. He was among a trio, selected by Wusu to accompany him on a trip to Europe in 2009. If SCI’s initial problem was getting children to come down with the consent of their parents, their arrival in Abeokuta presented further problems of feeding, proper care, and so on. “Frankly, things are easier now,” Wusu admitted. “Back then in 2000 we went through such a torrid time that some of the children actually wanted to go back to their parents, believing that I had brought them down to suffer. Then, to raise money sometimes, we would have to go by the roadside to sell books.

We also didn’t have convenient living quarters. We were surviving on makeshift arrangements that weren’t palatable,” he added. Blessing confirmed the stringent initial conditions of living in SCI. “Life was very difficult for me when I first came here. Feeding was a major challenge, water and other basic amenities too. The difficulties made me think of my mother always and I wanted to return to her. I thank God that I coped with the advice of Big Uncle (as Wusu is known by the special children) and I’ve gained admission to Olabisi Onabanjo University.”

Nowadays, as Wusu says, things are easier now. SCI now owns its own properties, it no longer rents, and it is still developing its buildings with Wusu as the chief architect. “We build everything by human effort, not money,” said Wusu, adding, “All the blocks we use are made right here on site. I design the structures according to our needs in both the schools and the hostel.” It has its own nursery, primary and secondary schools and many normal children in and around its host community are availing themselves of the quality education provided by SCI’s schools. “You will agree with me that it would be extremely impossible to have this group of schools and keep turning back parents who request to have their children admitted, saying, “it’s only for certain special children.

“It is just impossible. We even realised on time the sense in having day students here. They help the special children to grow normally and also to have roots here and assimilate and learn the language here. Another good thing about having the other students is that their minimal tuition fees also help to pay the monthly half a million naira wages of our staff.”