The midwife who fled Boko Haram

Despite losing some of her own children during an attack, Dada Nguru is keeping other women and their babies alive.

Outside a zinc-roofed shack on the fringes of Nigeria's capital, Abuja, Dada Nguru, a self-taught midwife, hangs a large sugar sack that has been ripped open out to dry. Earlier that day, she had laid a woman on it as she delivered her baby boy.
Hours later, a saline bag still hangs from the small open window, the only source of light in the cramped single room that is heady with the smell of sweat.
Nguru's children sleep in this room, the same room that the women come to give birth in. For more than a year, this ramshackle building in the suburb of Kabusa has been their home - and the midwife's delivery room.
Her one-year-old son, Muhammadu, nursing at her breast beneath the folds of her flowing red abaya, was still in her belly when she fled her home in the town of Gwoza, in the northeastern state of Borno, and arrived here.
"I came pregnant and gave birth to him here," she says, adding: "We left because of Boko Haram."

A midwife's gift
Nguru sits on a low stool beneath a metal sheet awning in her small dirt yard, just hours after delivering the baby on the sugar sack. The story she begins to tell is one that many women share. As the insurgency in the northeast has escalated over the past few years, the number of Nigeria's internally displaced persons (IDPs) has skyrocketed, with 2.15 million displaced as of last September, according to the UN high commissioner for refugees (UNHCR) and the International Organization for Migration. These IDPs are either living in camps or are living scattered across neighbouring states.
Hundreds of thousands of those forced to flee their homes were women, and Nguru knows first-hand, as a mother and a midwife, the particular challenges they face.
"It's a gift," she says of her skill as a midwife.
The 37-year-old mother of nine, who has a long scar running across her right cheek, has been a traditional birth attendant for more than a decade, learning, she explains, from knowledge passed down by others and her own intuition. "I can tell if the child is positioned right," she says, smoothing her hands over her stomach. "If a woman has a baby that is breach, I can turn it."
Five other women from Gwoza gather around her as she speaks. Some of them are her patients. Her elderly mother, Aishatu Audu, whose lined face is marked with the same furrowed brow as her daughter, sits among them, playing with her three-year-old granddaughter, Umma.
Mamma Mary, as the women affectionately call a softly-spoken mother of six with a vibrant wrap of fabric around her head, is nine months pregnant. Nguru says she is ready to give birth any day now.

"Our life in Gwoza was good before Boko Haram," Mary sighs. "We had our houses, the kids were in school, we had food."

On the outskirts of Abuja, self-taught midwife Dada Nguru sits with women who fled with her from the town of Gwoza, in northeastern Nigeria [Caelainn Hogan/Al Jazeera]

The day Boko Haram came
It was late afternoon on a Tuesday in October 2014. Nguru remembers how fighters in army uniforms drove into their village in armoured vehicles. They entered their homes, forcing the women and children out. At first, the women had assumed they were soldiers.
"Then we noticed a lot of them were wearing flip-flops," says Nguru. "Some of them, the trousers wouldn't be their size - they had to fold the bottoms. They were not looking smart."
They ransacked houses and dragged men outside before slaughtering them in front of their wives. "They told us they were instructed not to kill the women," she says. "Otherwise, they would have killed us, too."
In the panic, families were separated. Nguru thought her husband was dead and kept scanning the ground for his body. When they began to set fire to the houses, she and the other women fled. Her mother hid with others in the mountains nearby for five days. Both are in Kabusa now.

'They took our children'
Many of the women lost children along the way. One sitting among them now clutches a toddler to her chest and wipes tears from her cheeks.
"They took her kids," says Nguru. "The one feeding her baby there, they took her boy."
Two of Nguru's own children, her 14-year-old daughter and nine-year-old son, were separated from her in the chaos of the attack. "We couldn't find them," she says simply. "I hope they are still alive."
The journey for Nguru and the other women from Gwoza to Kabusa took a month. First they fled on foot, walking for nearly two days to reach the nearby town of Magadali, where they hoped to rest.

But after they arrived, Boko Haram attacked there also, so they had to push onwards. It took them five days to reach Mubi, the next major town. They spent a week or so there. But once again, Boko Haram followed, as if hunting down the women. They pressed on, getting lifts from passing trucks or cars whenever they could.

"The vehicles that picked us [up] would be the ones driven by traders, used for carrying beets," says Nguru. "If it were a smaller car, one woman would go in the car and we would give her the children."