If that’s helping…
21 of the Chibok girls kidnapped into sex slavery by Boko Haram have been freed.
In an emotional ceremony in the capital Abuja, one of the girls said they had survived for 40 days without food and narrowly escaped death at least once.
It is unclear how the release was negotiated, but an official says talks are under way to free some more girls.
Of the 276 students kidnapped in April 2014, 197 are still missing.
197, two and a half years into their enslavement.
Many of the kidnapped students were Christian but had been forcibly converted to Islam during captivity.
Another girl said: “We never imagined that we would see this day but, with the help of God, we were able to come out of enslavement.”
But God could have freed all of the girls, as soon as they were kidnapped – or just prevented them from being kidnapped in the first place. I don’t see why God gets credit for such delayed, incomplete, grudging “help.” And what about the kidnappers, who doubtless credit God with helping them kidnap 276 girls to rape?
Not that I want to jeer at them for it, but I think it’s sad that the tyrant god gets thanked no matter what happens, and credited for helping when 197 girls are still out there.
Not to mention that fails to acknowledge the very real work being done by humans to get them out.
It’s a tough situation. I have no doubt that their ~faith~ (as opposed to their absentee, nonexistent God) did get them through the worst nights. There’s a reason that religiosity goes up in hard times. There were certainly no actual people in their lives they could turn to for succor, so they focused on an imaginary one instead. It’s frustrating, of course, because their captors were attributing their own heinous actions on an equally imaginary bogeyman.
I’d love to have these girls come to the realization that it was their own internal strength that got them through this, that empowered them to survive until help came. But I am nowhere near wise enough to figure out a way to bring that realization to them without inflicting more trauma first.