Volunteers aid Nigeria's traumatized Boko Haram victims

By Rafiu Ajakaye

LAGOS, Nigeria

As the Nigerian military pushes Boko Haram back to the country’s northeastern fringes, the government and aid agencies are facing up to the massive financial and human cost of the seven-year war.

In Yola, the capital of Adamawa State, a 24-year-old woman is trying to address the impact of the horrors of Boko Haram atrocities on the mental health of the region’s youth -- an aspect that has so far failed to attract the attention of the government and aid agencies.

Blessing Douglas, a politics graduate of the city’s American university, has launched an initiative she has called Kintsukoroi -- a Japanese term that roughly translated as “the piece is more beautiful for having been broken”.

“NGOs come down here in their numbers for rescue missions,” she told Anadolu Agency. “They donate food, clothes and give shelter but very few are focusing on the psychological trauma or mental health of victims in this region.

“We believe that early orientation and counseling will do a great deal in managing emotional trauma and reduce the risk of making wrong decisions.”

Adamawa is one of the three states most heavily ravaged by Boko Haram in a campaign of terror that killed more than 20,000 people and displaced around 2.3 million.

As the army has pushed the terror group back from the territorial gains it made in 2014, the government has had to face up to the financial costs – it says up to 2 trillion naira ($6.28 billion) is needed to fix the northeast’s social infrastructure -- as well as the scale of human suffering, with relief agencies reporting 7 million people in need of urgent humanitarian assistance.

However, the psychological impact on Boko Haram’s victims is likely to be another long-term problem facing the region.

Hacked to death

Many women and children have reported extremely distressing experiences, such as being forced to watch sons or husbands hacked to death.

According to the World Health Organization, around one-in-10 of Nigerians aged 10 to 60 have some kind of behavior disorder and one-in-five 13- to 18-year-olds live with a mental health condition.

UNICEF says six out of every 10 children in the northeast suffer some form of violence before reaching 18.

The Kintsukoroi Foundation is focused on 10- to 24-year-olds and emerged from Douglas’s thesis research on child marriage that saw her study groups at a camp for internally displaced people, a primary health maternity center and a support group for HIV patients.

She said her mission became clear after a 13-year-old victim of child marriage who became HIV positive and later lost her baby died in March.

“Sometimes things happen in life that we have no control over and in any situation we find ourselves we have to make a decision to pick up the broken pieces of our lives and move on,” she said.

“The choice is ours -- we can come out bitter or better.”

Kintsukoroi is currently staffed by assistants at the school where Douglas temporarily works as a graduate intern as well as two clinical psychologists who are helping train volunteers.

Drop in the ocean

“Through counseling and therapy, the clinical psychologists are able to identify the clients that will need to be placed on medication and we raise the necessary resources to provide the medication,” she said.

The foundation works with two schools with a high number of displaced children, both in Yola, and has so far counseled at least 307 victims of the violence.

Although the impact is a drop in the ocean when compared to the huge numbers in need of psychological help, the foundation is having a real impact on the lives of those it touches, even helping with training and business skills.

It is funded largely by small donations and is struggling to compete for the few grants available in Nigeria’s current economic climate to pay for therapy centers and further one-on-one counseling.

“This project has two major parts,” Douglas said. “The first is counseling and therapy and the second is a skill acquisition empowerment program.

“The aim of the program is to give a positive distraction. Instead of getting good therapy and going back home to reminisce on their problems, they are occupied with putting the skills they learn to use and making a living out of it.

“At this point, we have only been successful with the counseling outreach because of very little funding.”

The foundation also aims to provide the government with data on people suffering the mental health consequences of living through the Boko Haram terror.