For the first ten days, we nourished on disbelief. We said, ‘this could not be happening.’ Though we woke-up every next morning to see their ugly faces, we slept again each night in denial, hoping that when we woke, we will be in our beds – at home. We pinched ourselves… it did not work; we hardly believed it would. As we moved and responded to their orders those first days, we were sometimes stubborn, some of us got hit. This was because we still believed we were valuable, humans who could not be subjected to such a harsh reality.

The next ten days was our rude awakening. We realized this was no dream. We had gotten used to our captors’ names and faces. The forest as a new home was becoming familiar to us. This was real. We were abductees, forceful guests of the terrorists’ lair. We realized these days that we were not by any chance the first abductees of Boko Haram – there were girls here, abducted years ago. Mothers, who’d had kids in these camps. Young men, abducted and forced to fight for Boko Haram. We realized that things will never be the same again. We started to settle. We realized we had to be nice. And when some of us died – from snake bites, from rape and infections, and being shot, we realized our destiny did not have the pleasant stories of life in it, the sweet ending tales, but that ours was to be a story written with pain and blood. In these days we cried. We thought of home and saw our parents shriveling away. We felt them die. We knew they were dying. Lord have mercy on them.