Starving toddler thrives five years on
Five years after a picture of him shocked the world, the boy called Hope is thriving and living up to his name
IN PHOTOGRAPHS he looks like any other happy boy, his skin glowing with health, a grin plastered across his face.
There’s one of him all dressed up in a three-piece suit, ready to attend a wedding. In an earlier picture he’s a toddler wearing bright red shorts, chunky white trainers and a little backpack as he prepares for preschool.
In the first picture ever taken of him, however, he looks nothing like this. He is naked, emaciated and barely alive, preparing to sip from a bottle of water held up to him by Danish aid worker Anja Ringgren Lovén.
The picture, taken in Nigeria on 16 January 2016, quickly went viral and the story behind it was nothing short of tragic.
The child was about two years old when he was accused of being a witch by people in his village. He was cast out and forced to live on the streets with other abandoned, unwanted children – and when Anja saw him she was appalled.
“He looked like a little skeleton,” she says. “I was surprised he could stand on his own.
“He started dancing when we approached him.”
She asked the villagers if she could give him some water and a biscuit.
“I took him in a blanket and said to the team, ‘Let’s get the hell out of here’.”
As they drove to a nearby clinic, Anja decided the boy should be named Hope. “Because we all hoped he would survive.”
She wasn’t convinced he would, though. “His breathing was so heavy and you could see his bones through his skin.
“I was so sure he was going to die that I was thinking about where we would bury this boy.”
Anja (40), who founded the Land of Hope non-profit organisation and orphanage in Nigeria in 2012 with her husband, law student David Emmanuel Umem, took Hope in and helped nurse him back to health. There are now 70 children in the care of the Land of Hope – and young Hope (now 7) is one of their shining success stories.
“It’s hard to believe five years have already passed,” she says.
“I remember the day we rescued Hope as if it was yesterday.”
She’s been involved in hundreds of child rescues but Hope’s will always stand out.
“It’s one of the most emotional missions I have ever been a part of.”
‘I WAS SO SURE HE WAS GOING TO DIE I WAS THINKING ABOUT WHERE WE’D BURY THIS BOY’
GROWING up in Denmark, Anja and her sisters were often chided by their mother at mealtimes when they didn’t finish everything on their plates. “Think about the children in Africa who don’t have any food,” she’d tell them.
Anja’s mom worked in a nursing home and instilled in Anja, her twin, Tina, and older sister, Maria, the importance of caring for others and helping people in need.
As a child, Anja was fascinated by Africa and would get library books to learn as much as she could about the continent and its cultures.
“I dreamt of living in an African village,” she says. “It saddened me to think about children who didn’t have access to the same food as me.”
Her mother taught her about equality and human rights. “She was a strong, independent woman and an active member of society who helped many people.”
When Anja was 23, cancer took her mother’s life. That tragedy, as well as the 2008 documentary The Witch Children of Africa, had Anja questioning her existence and her purpose in the world.
“That documentary stayed in my brain. I thought I knew a lot about different cultures, but I hadn’t heard of this before – that children could be scapegoats of superstitious beliefs. I wanted to see if I could help these children.”
One study estimated that between 1999 and 2008 some 15 000 children in Nigeria had been “marked” as witches and abandoned or murdered by people in their villages.
In 2011 Anja quit her job as a clothing store manager, gave up her apartment and sold all her belongings.
She spent three months as an aid worker in Malawi, Tanzania and Nigeria, where she met her husband. Together they launched the African Children’s Aid Education and Development Foundation, a non-profit organisation that rescues children who have been abandoned by their families, many because of superstitious beliefs.
The Land of Hope orphanage is part of the organisation. “Every child in the world has the right to food and education and to live a dignified life,” she says.
ACCUSATIONS of witchcraft are illegal in Nigeria, but very difficult to police. There are many reasons why people are accused of witchcraft, Anja says: death or illness in the family, a failed harvest, infertility or losing a job. “Based on some traditional beliefs, everything that happens has a supernatural reason and most often it is the children who suffer because of it.”
In the state of Akwa Ibom, where Anja is based, “the beliefs of Pentecostal Christianity are mixed with local tribal religions to form a deadly cocktail that includes beliefs in witches and exorcism”, she says.
The phenomenon exploded across the region in the 1990s, fuelled partly by popular Nollywood films and self-professed prophets who manipulated people’s fears to make money. Many “prophets” perform “exorcisms” for a price, often up to R7 400, which is a year’s salary for many Nigerians.
Children who’ve been branded witches have been chained, starved, beaten and even set on fire. There have even been cases of parents attempting to behead their children with saws.
“We have the laws to address witch-branding,” Nigerian lawyer James Ibor says. “But the problem is not the laws – the problem is implementing these laws.”
Education is the only way to free people from their superstitions, Anja says.
“Lack of education and extreme poverty have created this widespread belief that children can be witches who curse the families and villages in which they were born. Our work strongly promotes the importance of education.”
The global response to the photo of an emaciated little Hope “was a wake-up call for the Western world,” says Anja, who has a six-year-old son, David Jr.
“Today as I look back, my team and I have rescued so many children who would be dead today if we were not there.”