“We Survived Because We Believed People Were Praying For Us”

Mrs. Rachael Alamu recounts 56 days in captivity with her pupils. 

By Njideka Maduka 

There are interviews that report the news, and there are interviews that preserve history. 

For 56 days, the forest became a classroom without walls, a shelter without a roof, and a prison without certainty.

Mrs. Rachael Alamu, Principal of Community High School, Esiele, lived through that ordeal alongside her pupils after they were abducted in Oyo State by terrorists. In this interview granted few days after their rescue, she speaks with remarkable composure about fear, faith, survival, the resilience of the children, and the hope that kept them going.

Among the many striking moments in the interview, one sentence captures the faith that sustained them through those difficult days:

"We survived because we believed people were praying for us."

Below is the interview transcript.

REPORTER:
Now you've taken us through some of your journey while you were in there. How was the experience for you? Fifty-six days.

MRS. ALAMU:
Fifty-six days. It was... You can only imagine, and imagining it even is like believing it.

It was not easy. We were in the forest in the open most of the time, under the sun, under the rain, with the children.

But we kept going because there was no way out. We knew it's God that could only help us. So that really helped us.

And the fact that we believed people were praying for us. That also helped us.

Because sometimes things we go through, you think that when you break down that will be the end, but you just survive it.

REPORTER:
On some of these children we saw scars. Were there moments you were maltreated?

MRS. ALAMU:
Personally, I was not beaten, but some of the children were beaten. You know children, some are quiet, some are loud, and what they hate most is noise because it attracts attention.

So the youngest of them, maybe the two. Waliya and Salam. They were the ones that took the worst of the beating.

They would close their mouths, tie them with clothes, and beat them.

The men had it worse than us because they were blindfolded, handcuffed, and chained on the leg, all of them, until they remained two.

REPORTER:
So was there any form of molestation on anybody?

MRS. ALAMU:
Sexual molestation? No. No.

REPORTER:
Mrs. Alamu, what next for you now? What's going through your mind?

MRS. ALAMU:
I want to see my husband when I get home. I can't think of any other thing, but definitely it has to be something that will be good for me.

REPORTER:
How did you constantly encourage the children, because they're kids? How were you able to cope?

MRS. ALAMU:
We psyched them up. When we started, the first week, they were bringing biscuits for them, maybe to make them comfortable.

But along the line, that stopped. Then we had to move from one point to another, and that was a major problem we had when the place was discovered. We had to move, and that started around seven or eight in the night.

Sometimes four hours. That's where most of the bruises you see on our bodies came from.

REPORTER:

With the children? 

MRS ALAMU:

Yes. Yes. They carry the last three- Salam, Waliyat and Testimony. The girls, my secondary school girls, would carry the younger ones. The others would walk. They would have to walk, would fall sometimes. A lot.

REPORTER:
How long did it take you on that day to navigate through that forest?

MRS. ALAMU:
When we were taken, my car was used to convey us to a point. That was where we met the primary pupils and their teacher. So we had to walk.

We walked for about one hour. They brought motorcycles, about ten of them. We were packed on them and rode for more than four hours.

Uncharted paths, but they knew their way.

REPORTER: (inaudible)

MRS. ALAMU:
What actually happened? I thought they left the car there. The police would have towed the car to their office.

But somebody showed me the car where it was burnt, and that was not the path we took. I thought they drove it to that point before it was torched. That was not the way we took into the forest.

REPORTER:
Would this impact you going forward?

MRS. ALAMU:
Going to a rural area will take the grace of God. You know, with time. I've worked for 28 years, so I have about four years left, maybe.

I can get over it, but going that far, the distance between that place and here is far already, so I sacrifice a lot when it comes to transportation. Now, coupled with this, I don't know.

Source: TVC News interview.