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| US kids' months of begging in Africa over |
| August 20 2004 at 02:24PM |
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Ibadan - Allegedly abandoned by their American mother as she took up military contract work in Iraq, seven American children left behind for months in Africa begged for change for food and shuttled from a stranger's care to a state-run orphanage, recalled Nigerians who crossed their paths.
Swarmed by the American children, missionary Warren Beemer - a Texan himself - quizzed the brothers and sisters on the roster of the Houston Rockets basketball team to test that they were who they said. Ultimately, Beemer launched into the American national anthem. Placing their hands on their hearts, the American children joined in - singing out the Star-Spangled Banner on the grass-and-dirt yard of the Nigerian orphanage. On Friday, the American children were back in the United States, in the care of foster parents in Houston.
Authorities believe Liggins took the seven children in October to Nigeria, where a relative of her fiance lived. Liggins returned to Houston within weeks, leaving the children behind. She later went to work as a food-service worker in US military mess halls in Iraq, authorities said. Officials said she quit in July. An official at Nigeria's ministry of women's affairs, community development and social welfare told The Associated Press on Thursday that the Nigerian government had known about the abandoned children before their discovery by the American missionary. Local Nigerian authorities had not notified the US Embassy because the case was a sensitive matter diplomatically, the official said, speaking on condition of anonymity. "The children were ill and besides that we have procedures to follow. I could not take it upon myself to inform the American Embassy," the official said. Nigerian government workers and others who knew the children said Liggins had left the children in the care of a businessman, identified as Obiora Nwankwo. His two-story house is a well-cared-for building in an affluent neighborhood of Ibadan. Nwankwo, a slim man dressed in a suit and tie, drove up to the gates of an Ibadan Montessori school on October 16. He enrolled the children in classes with what officials here said were benefits money from Liggins. "He claimed he was their guardian," principal Johnson Akintayo said Friday. "They were put up in the boarding school." Their new school was clean, fronted by a row of tall palm trees, and the children seemed happy there at first. But when they returned from Obiora's home after Christmas break, they appeared underfed and neglected, said Victoria Mustafa, matron of the girls' boarding quarters. "They were very pale and had lost weight," Mustafa said. The children began begging classmates and staff for money, using it to buy food. The matron remembered Brandy, the eldest at 16, talking about America, her Houston high school, and home. "Brandy would talk about the school where she was, how she loved it," Mustafa said. But Nwankwo missed payment after payment to the school. He also began complaining that staff there were being too nosey about the children. "The man grew suspicious when he claimed that some members of staff were embarrassing the children by asking certain questions," Akintayo said. By July 22, all seven siblings had stopped attending, and dropped out of sight. The answer to their whereabouts came six days later, when Ibadan's Association of Women Lawyers alerted local immigration authorities about the children, the social welfare official said. Immigration and other government officials raided Nwankwo's home the same day. Once hearty, the Americans were now malnourished. "Some of them were sick, critically ill," with typhoid and malaria, the official said. Four of the Americans were so sick enough they had to be admitted to hospital. They eventually joined their siblings at Ibadan's orphanage. Their lodgers were fellow orphans as well as juvenile criminals, including young thieves and rapists. On Friday, children at the home dressed in dirty and ripped clothes, went about chores at the orphanage. A 13-year-old girl washed dishes in an aluminum pail, while younger children put the dishes away. Young children carried buckets of cassava on their heads. With rice, beans and other traditional dishes, the greens were the principal food for the children. Some Nigerian officials said authorities hoped to feed the children heavily, putting weight on them and bringing them back to health, before alerting Americans. The Americans indeed ate well - at least better than the Nigerian wards at the orphanage, said Brahim, another adult student living at the orphanage. "Some of them do not eat well. I am human: I cannot lie," Brahim said. The American children passed their time playing board games or cadging a staff member's cellphones to play one of the electronic games on it - an echo of their lives in the high-tech United States. "They were happy," said Brahim, who would play with the American children. Alex, the other student, said he exchanged email addresses with two of the children, 16-year-old Brandy and 12-year-old Alice, as American Embassy staffers eventually ushered them out. "They were very happy," he said. "But they were even crying when they were leaving, because we had got so used to each other." - Sapa-AP
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