Head Count

To Be a Child

Being a kid used to be easy.


We were told stories of monsters, but we never really met them.
We read about monsters in books. We feared them in the dark, then laughed in the morning. They stayed in stories. They didn’t come home to us to take us with them.

But being a child now… it's not the same.

We feared monsters.
These children are living with them.

Something has gone very wrong in this country and it's impossible to explain without your voice shaking a little. Childhood is no longer protected. It is interrupted in classrooms, on roads, in schools, in villages that used to feel ordinary.

In Nigeria, we have watched this pattern repeat for years. Chibok. Dapchi. Kankara. Jangebe. Then more reports from Kaduna, Zamfara, Niger, Katsina.

Entire groups of students taken at once. Children pulled out of schools and into uncertainty.
Each time it happens, the names change. The places change. But the feeling is the same.


Shock. Prayer. Waiting. Silence. Then another headline.

And what happens after? We start to adjust. We start to move on faster. We start to treat it like something that happens “somewhere else.” But there is no “somewhere else” when it is a child. Imagine being 9 years old and already understanding ransom negotiations with your life on the line.

A child is a child.

Some of them leave home in the morning with uniforms still crisp, lunch packed, maybe even money for snacks. Parents wave them off and try not to think too far ahead. School should be the safest place in their day. Instead, for too many families, it has become the place they fear most.

There are mothers who cannot sleep properly anymore. Some cannot sleep at all. Fathers who jump at every late-night phone call. Siblings who keep looking at the door as if waiting for someone who may or may not come back.

And in between all of this, life still continues outside. Markets are open. Traffic moves. Campaigns happen. People argue about things that makes no sense. Somewhere in the background, a family is sitting with a missing child and a silence they cannot explain to anyone.

This is what it means when fear stops being strange.

As Wole Soyinka once said, “The man dies in all who keep silent in the face of tyranny.”
There is something like that happening here too. Something in us dies when we keep adjusting to the suffering of children.

Because these are not just “cases.” They are children who were laughing not long before they disappeared. Children who still argue over small things. Children who barely know left from right. Children who still believe adults are supposed to keep them safe.

That belief is what makes this so heartbreaking.

We are not just losing security. We are losing the simfple promise that a child should be able to go to school and come back home.

Maybe that is what hurts most. Not only the kidnappings themselves, but how easily we are learning to live around them.

We should not be used to this.
We cannot afford to be used to this.

We may not be able to fix the entire nation overnight. We may not be able to stop every evil hand from reaching where it should not. But we can refuse to become numb. We can refuse to let this become normal.

Because every time a child is taken, something breaks in more than one home. It breaks trust in what should be basic. It breaks the sense that the world still protects its smallest people.

So let it not become normal in us.
Let it still bother us.
Let it still sit heavy.
Let it still make us care enough to act.

And when we see children—any child—may we not look away. May we not assume someone else will step in. May we be present enough, kind enough, alert enough to stand in the gap where we can.

Because a country is only as honest as how it treats its children.

And right now, too many children are asking questions no child should ever have to ask.

We owe them more than silence. We owe them action. We owe them safety.

Somewhere in this country tonight, a child will struggle to sleep because fear has entered childhood too early. And sometimes, the difference between trauma and healing is simply whether an angel showed up in time.

May we become those Angels.