What superstition does
From last month – the Independent reports on a Danish aid worker who rescues Nigerian children who’ve been abandoned because someone thinks they’re “witches.”
An aid worker whose rescue of an emaciated two-year-old boy made headlines around the world has spoken about how she gave up everything in Denmark to help “the witch children of Nigeria”.
Anja Ringgren Lovén was pictured offering water and biscuits to a small and very thin little boy called Hope, who had been abandoned by his family because of local superstitions about witchcraft.
Ms Lovén took Hope in, and he is now one of 34 children being cared for at the African Children’s Aid Education and Development Foundation (ACAEDF) which she founded with her husband David.
Brace yourself.
Speaking in an interview with the Huffington Post, Ms Lovén said she first saw the problems created by superstition in rural Nigeria when she travelled there alone three years ago and met children “who had been tortured and beaten almost to death because they were accused of being witches and therefore left alone on the street”.
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“Being rejected by your own family must be the loneliest feeling a child can experience, and I don’t believe that anyone can imagine how that must feel like.”
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“We rescue and we give love and support to the vulnerable children accused of witchcraft in Akwa Ibom. But to put an end to superstition, exorcism and black magic performed by pastors and the so-called witchdoctors, advocacy work must be carried out,” she said.
Also some law-enforcement would be useful.
Witches. In the 21st century. And the Catholic Church can’t quite get past the “reality” that there are witches – because the Bible says there are. It’s a disgrace.