WWhat 19-year-old Binta Usman remembers most vividly about her early days at the Lafiya Sarari girls’ school in Maiduguri, the capital of Nigeria’s Borno state, are the frequent tears that made it difficult for her to concentrate in class.
“We were all in the classroom and we were all crying,” she says.
Like Usman, whose father was murdered and his family held captive by the militant jihadist group Boko Haram, all 100 women and girls at the school have either witnessed the murder of a parent or been kidnapped themselves.
Another student, 17-year-old Hassana, remembers being forced to join the militants, handle weapons and commit acts of violence. “We drank blood,†she says.
Boko Haram has attacked schools since 2010 as part of its campaign of atrocities in northeastern Nigeria. The country has seen massacres and several kidnappings, including the one in 2014. murder of 59 schoolboysthe kidnapping of 276 schoolgirls in Chibok in 2014 and 101 girls in Dapchi in 2018.
According to the UN, between 2013 and 2018 Boko Haram has kidnapped more than a thousand children, and used them as soldiers and as domestic or sex slaves. Amnesty International has done that estimated that 1,436 Between December 2020 and October 2021, schoolchildren and 17 teachers were kidnapped.
The Lafiya Sarari The school was founded in response to the terror caused by Boko Haram. The school was founded in 2017 by the Neem Foundation, a Nigerian charity established to help communities affected by violence. It is designed to provide support and education to those who have suffered trauma.
“What we do is a trauma-informed learning approach,” says Dr. Fatima Akilu, a psychologist who helped set up the foundation. “It’s not a fixed program.â€
She says: “Some people have post-traumatic stress disorder, some suffer from depression, some come with anxiety – it changes.
“We initially had a psychologist when we first started, but now we just have a full-time counselor who knows the girls and has been with them all the time.”
Akilu initially saw Lafiya Sarari as a model of reconciliation, where children of victims, perpetrators and security forces could be educated together.
But the conflict disrupted education, creating learning gaps for children too old for traditional primary school lessons. “I didn’t even know ‘ABC’ when I came here,” says Usman, who enrolled at the age of 12.
The selection process involved interviewing girls between the ages of 11 and 14 from displaced communities and refugee camps. “We selected girls who were tenacious and could become something, because this was going to be quite a long project.
“A fair number of girls had come out of captivity at the time, so some of them were in really bad shape (and needed trauma support). That was also one of the criteria, because we could give them long-term treatment,” says Akilu.
Funding for the ongoing pilot program for 100 girls came from a US grant Catena Foundation. Initially, the students learned together, but as they progressed, they were streamed for academic performance. Thirty students have successfully completed the national exams and are preparing for university this year.
IIt’s a far cry from how they arrived, fearful and distrustful. They had difficulty getting along with other children or making friends and often resorted to violence at the slightest provocation. “They only knew how to fight,” said Yakubu Gwadeda, the deputy headmaster.
“They didn’t know how to interact peacefully, how to stand in line,” he says.
Those who had been involved with Boko Haram, like Hassana, tried to intimidate their peers with the threat of violence.
“They went through intervention sessions, coping sessions, resilience and expressive therapy,” says the school counselor, Hauwa Abdullahi Zaifada. “Some couldn’t talk about their experiences, but we heard their stories through drawings and music.
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“Sometimes,” she adds, “they would come to the sessions without saying a word, and we would have to reschedule.”
One of Zaifada’s main objectives was to overcome Boko Haram’s indoctrination against education. She saw an opportunity when several girls spoke about their desire for revenge against those who had killed or exploited their parents.
“I told them you don’t have to be a soldier or hold a gun to take revenge,” Zaifada says. “Education can be their revenge.
“They realized that education is valuable and can help them. So they started doing better in school and doing well.â€
Falmata Mohammed Talba, 20, found the daily therapy at school so helpful that she started repeating the sessions with her two brothers, who attend a government-run school.
She helped them cope with the trauma they collectively experienced after witnessing the murder of their father by Boko Haram and subsequently being held captive with their mother.
“When I first started, I saw her one-on-one almost every day for about six months. Sometimes I even ran out of class. Talking to the psychologist helped me a lot,’ says Talba.
‘I helped my brothers like Lafiya Sarari helped me. I tell my brothers, ‘This is what they told me. Why don’t you start practicing them too?†That’s how they’ve changed.â€
Talba says she and her brothers can now talk openly about their father, without succumbing to tears or anger. “We now say, ‘Remember this when we were with Dad,’ and we can laugh,” she says.
Hassana’s psychological progress was remarkable, even though her academic progress was slower than that of some of her peers. She still depends on an interpreter to express herself in English.
“My relatives were so concerned about my behavior that whenever I started acting out, they started shouting passages from the Quran to calm me down,” she says. “But that all stopped. The nightmares have stopped too.â€
Seven years after launching Lafiya Sarari, Zaifada still has daily sessions with her students.
“Now I don’t have to look for them anymore. They come to me when they have problems,” she says. “Most of the problems now are environmental influences, family issues.”
As for Usman, the crying has stopped. She smiles broadly as she shares her ambitions to win a scholarship to study law at the University of Cambridge.
“I hear it’s a good school,” she says.