The girl who spoke to LEADERSHIP Sunday on phone but pleaded not to be named said she was among the eight students that made it back to town.
“When we got to the Sambisa forests they decided to divide us into threegroups and each group was asked to go to different direction of the forest”, said the girl. We were taking to the camp from where we were able to escape. We never saw the other girls in the other two camps till we managed to run back home”, said the girl.
The schoolgirl said none of them was hurt at the time they arrived Sambisa.
“Some of them were speaking to us in harsh tone, but others will tell them not to be harsh on us; all of them were holding guns, and many use to cover their faces. They asked us to always sit very close to one another; each time we hear the sound of an aircraft, they would ask us to quickly go under the thick shrubs and trees that no one can spot us there; and the plane will come and go without sighting us”.
The girl added that about five of them actually wanted to escape, but the fifth of them was not close by at the time they took their chance to run.
“We didn’t run in the night”, said the escapee girl. “It was towards evening when we went to fetch water; about five of us planned to run that day, but when the time came one of us was not nearby, so we bolted off and ran until we got to a certain spot where we hid under some thick shrubs. There we waited to see if the fifth girl would join us, but she never did. So we had to wait till when it was very dark before we crept away and ran till day break. We ran into a Fulani nomad who hid us in his house, then later assisted us to escape further by showing us the path we had to take back to Chibok; from there we got to a village, near Chibok and a man who saw us quickly took us into his house and hid us for some times so that the people there would not know we were there, because according to him some of the Boko Haram informants in the village might want to harm us if they found out we were in the village”.
The escapee girl who requested that the names of the villages where they were helped should not be mentioned so that the Boko Haram gunmen would not go and harm the people there, said most of them that escaped from Sambisa came from one particular village near Chibok (name withheld) where the people are known for their bravery.
Source: Leadership
