For over thirteen years, the same people and faces have lived in the worn makeshift tents and walked the same beaten paths across eight IDP camps in Maiduguri. It is all too common for us, far removed from the hardship to glance over these reported numbers as sad statistics. The truth is, these are real lives and real people whose dreams and goals have been violently uprooted and thrust into a cycle of fear, lack, and uncertainty.

When we arrived at Otobi Akpa, the air was heavy with a sorrow we could almost touch. What we saw in the faces of the people, however, was not despair but the unspoken resilience of a village that has looked death in the face and continues to eke out a living amid suffering.

The Lay Faithful Trust Fund last visited the Christian Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) at the Sangere Dutse, Fombina E.Y.N., and Anguwan Fulani Family IDP camps in the Girei Local Government Area (LGA), Adamawa State, in December 2025. In January, we returned on another aid mission to provide our persecuted brothers and sisters with sorely needed clothes.

On Sunday, 18th January 2026, many Nigerians awoke to a deepening nightmare in the Middle Belt: 177 Christians were taken hostage on a Sunday morning. Abducted from three different congregations, the victims included members of the Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) and two Cherubim and Seraphim Church assemblies. The residents of Kurmin Wali, Kajuru Local Government Area (LGA) came to a grim realisation: the mass abduction of Christians had taken on a darker, more terrifying dimension.