Joy Bishara and Lydia Pogu were among the more than 200 girls kidnapped by Boko Haram from their boarding school in Chibok, Nigeria back in 2014.
Now 20 and 19, they’ve both just graduated high school in Virginia, thanks to a United States charity who brought over about 10 of the 57 girls who escaped the Islamic militant group.
How they actually managed to get away from their kidnappers, though, is absolutely astonishing. Bishara and Pogu told People the whole story in a detailed feature on their incredible escape. They tell it without much fanfare, but holy shit. It is absolutely wild stuff.
In the 12-minute video, they explain how Boko Haram soldiers stormed the school while the girls were sleeping, telling the students that they were police officers. The girls did not believe them.
“We were all crying and screaming. They told us to keep quiet or they’re going to kill us. So they start to shoot their guns up on top of us, making us quiet. All of us were scared. We were just holding each other.“They asked us to follow them, we should go with them. When we tried going with them, some of us start running … then they went and put us all back together and said, ‘OK, you all have to cooperate or else we are going to just shoot any girl who just followed a different direction that we didn’t point.’”
The men told the girls that they could get into the back of a truck and live, or run away and die.
Amazingly, once the truck had started moving, kicking up clouds of dust behind it, Bishara, Pogu and a number of other girls jumped from the moving truck into the dust and scattered.
Three of the girls found each other in the bush and managed to flag down a motorcyclist, who took them all back to Chibok – no mean feat taking four people on a two-wheeled vehicle.
After being reunited with their families, Bishara and Pogu and a number of other escaped kidnapping victims, headed to the US to finish school.
Graduating is a huge deal to the pair, who have both said that when they were kidnapped, they thought they would lose the chance at an education forever.
They’re now raising funds via GoFundMe to attend Southeastern University in Florida, where they will undoubtedly continue being inspirational legends in their new home.
Source: Huffington Post / People.
Image: Facebook / Lydia P Audu.
