One of the many children that will not allow the horrors of Boko Haram bring them down – PB/TK
The boy who lived: surviving the scars of Nigeria’s Boko Haram insurgency – Temitope Kalejaiye and Hannah Summers
On the day he lost his arm, Jonathan Gambo had been sent to gather firewood in the Nigerian village of Uba, where his parents worked as farmers.
His elder brother had been curious to unearth a chunk of metal and unwittingly passed him the bomb before instructing him to throw it away.
The device blasted off Jonathan’s hand and right arm up to the elbow. The bone in his leg was protruding and he was bleeding from multiple flesh wounds.
“It backfired and cut my hand immediately; I felt dizzy and everything became a blur, and then I fell down,” remembers Jonathan.
His body was so blackened by the charcoal dust from the explosion that police who attended the scene declared him dead.
But the barely conscious 12-year-old overheard them talking and was able to force open his eyes. He even managed a smile to show he was still alive.
“A policeman tied my hand with a scarf and took me to the hospital,” he recalls.
“Some soldiers followed us and explained everything to the doctors. The other hand that was cut off by the bomb was buried.”
It is a story repeated in conflicts the world over – one of the innocent people accidentally maimed or killed by casually discarded ordnance. In this case, the culprit was a bomb left behind after a Boko Haram raid.
In north-east Nigeria, where progress to defeat the Islamist militant group is finally becoming apparent, it is a reminder that, even after the violence dissipates, the recovery process will be long and hard.
Continue to theguardian.com article: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2017/mar/29/the-boy-who-lived-surviving-scars-nigeria-boko-haram-insurgency
