Bring Back Our Girls

They must have run around the ground of the boarding school at the afternoon break. A girl giggling after another one tripped over. That girl might have cried, angry that she was giggled at. Finally, after the boring classes were over, they must have returned to the hostels, changed their clothes, had their snacks, and huddled in a class room to do their homework. They must have repeatedly looked at the wall clock, for the time when they would be allowed out of the room. As soon as the clock hit the time, they must have rushed out, only to be back to bed. In the quiet of the night, ceiling fans must have made whirring noise, fighting off the Nigerian summer. The girls must have been deep into sleep, dreaming perhaps.

What must it be like when they were woken up with noise, perhaps of gunfire, of crying and screaming friends? Bearded men brandishing machine guns in their hands must have grabbed their collars, pulled the girls out from their bunk beds, dragged them through the hallway while they were screaming and crying, loaded them in the truck like garbage bags and speeded through the dirt road, the truck jumping at the bumps, synced with the screams of terrified girls.

James Orbinski, who witnessed the horror of Rwandan genocide first hand as one of the only few doctors daring to care during the carnage writes, "...Over the last twenty years, I have struggled to understand how to respond to the suffering of others. I have come to know perhaps too well that only humans can be rationally cruel. Only humans can choose to sacrifice life in the name of some political end, and only humans can call such sacrifices into question...."

Boko Haram, a religious extremist group, kidnapped 276 girls from a Nigerian boarding school on the night of April 14-15. They are yet another testament to that rational cruelty. Hell needs not be imagined in various religious forms, the face of the evil ruling that hell can not be any crueler than of these kidnappers.