Blessing is a 9 year old girl from Eyetong in Oron Local Government Area. She’s one of the rarest children whose both parents are not only alive but living together. Her problems started when her mother was in labor and was taken to a traditional birth attendant (TBA) who’s also a spiritualist.
When complication set in, the TBA cum spiritualist accused Blessing of being responsible for her mother’s sickness and difficulty in delivery and asserted that she’s bent on killing the mother and her unborn child.
When Blessing’s father confronted her with the allegation of witchcraft practice, she denied knowledge of any involvement in sorcery. Out of fury, her father used machetes and sticks to beat her. He then unhung a wall mirror from their pallor and shattered it on her head. He used a piece of the mirror and hit her on the head where she bled to state of coma.
When her elder sister, Mary cried and shouted that Blessing was going die, he turned his aggression on her calling her ‘birds of the same feather…’ because she’s was also accused of witchcraft.
Though, Blessing’s mother finally gave birth to her younger brother unscathed, the witch stigma continued to linger on as she and her sister persistently endured horrendous torture and physical abuses in the house and spiritual healing homes, including being locked in a dark rooms and in the toilet for days without food to make die by piecemeal.
As they dropped out of school, her father formed the habit of taking them to a long distance on his motorbike and dropped in the bush or on the streets . When people picked them back home, his father would tell them that the children were no longer needed. In one of the occasions, a man saw them on the street and decided to take her elder sister, who was then thirteen claiming that he was taking her to Calabar. Since then, she has not been seen.
When her father took her this round and dropped on the street with blood all over her body due to the injury she sustained during the midnight rounds of torture, a man from the clustering crowd took her to the village head in a town she was dropped in the midnight. The village head called the police who came and took Blessing to the CRARN Children Center in Ikot Afaha, Eket where she was received by the Chair and Co-Founder of CRARN, Mrs Elizabeth Wilson-Itauma and where she is now living and continuing her education. Efforts to reunite her with her family, at moment, have not yet yielded any dividends.
– Sam Itauma, Headof CRARN Team
