Nigeria: Feel You’re One of Them

At most universities, senior week consists of one celebratory event after another, and so it is at Georgetown. But in the middle of senior convocation today Dahlgren Chapel will host an interfaith prayer service for the some 300 Muslim and Christian girls abducted in Nigeria — abducted probably for the purposes of forced labor, soldiering, or sex slavery.

This story from National Geographic online (my first visit) is a strong summary of the situation, and makes the often overlooked point that whereas in the developed world national governments’ official databases of their citizens are considered a gateway to state snooping, in the developing world such databases serve the crucial purpose of providing evidence that children abducted into slavery actually exist – the first step toward their recovery and the prosecution of their abductors.

This video shows Uwe Akpan, a Nigerian writer who was in residence at Georgetown in 2009, in conversation with Oprah Winfrey about his story “Fattening for Gabon,” which deals with child trafficking. Oprah: “I’ve done shows on this subject and said, Gee, that’s a good cause, but not feeling what the children felt until I read this story.”

That is what fiction does — or tries to do. But I doubt any of us can truly feel what those girls are feeling right now. It’s just too awful.

• 15 May 2014