![]() ![]() “My dad started loading bags at Western Airlines in 1940 and went on to become an executive at Pan Am. “Both my parents were airline pioneers,” said Ensign. She was born and raised in affluent Woodland Hills, California, the youngest of five siblings, and began traveling at an early age, from Singapore to Turkey to France. Long before she assumed her post in Nigeria five years ago, Ensign was a citizen of the world. “Kiss everybody goodbye you want to kiss.” Then he began a countdown for the 22 people, girls and parents alike, who would go to Yola. “We knew Boko Haram was in the area,” Rawlins said. Rawlins cast a wary glance at a group of men on the edge of the crowd whom nobody seemed to recognize. (“I didn’t get the fear gene,” Ensign later told me.) Quickly, about 200 locals gathered. “They had no money, no food, and they had all their possessions in little plastic bags.”Īs the van engines kept running, Ensign leapt out, greeted the girls and their families and told them “with cool assurance” (Rawlins’ words) that all would be well. “They were so scared, so skinny,” Ensign said of the girls. The girls and their parents warmed to the idea, then risked everything to make the extraordinary roadside rendezvous from their scattered small villages in the bush with the university president herself-an unforgettable encounter. One of those Chibok escapees had a sister at the American University of Nigeria, and it was she who approached Ensign in her campus office, pleading, “What can you do to help?”Įnsign resolved to bring some of the girls who’d escaped to the university, where they could live and complete their secondary schooling before beginning college coursework, all on full scholarship. ![]() They eventually returned to their villages to spend the broiling summer with their families, fearing another kidnapping mission every night. On that nightmarish night of the April abduction, 57 of the 276 kidnapped girls were able to jump off the trucks that were spiriting them away, and flee into the bush. The astonishing crime attracted attention worldwide, including the Twitter campaign #BringBackOurGirls. The girls had attended a boarding school near Chibok, an obscure provincial town that is now famous because of the attack on the school the previous April. “All the way up there I’m playing war games in my mind,” he remembered.Īfter three tense hours on the road, expecting to be ambushed by terrorists wielding automatic rifles at any moment, the little convoy rounded a corner and Ensign saw 11 girls and their families and friends waving and yelling at the vehicles approaching in clouds of dust. Marine, had contacts with vigilante groups in northern Nigeria, and thought he might be able to summon them if the going got tough. ![]() So they headed north in two Toyota vans, a suddenly meager contingent-Ensign, Rawlins, a driver and one other security guard-dashing down the crumbling two-lane highway through arid scrubland, deeper into remote country terrorized by the ruthless, heavily armed militant group called Boko Haram. “The president looked at me and I looked at her, and I knew what she was thinking,” Rawlins said. ![]() Running a college doesn’t often entail making split-second decisions about daredevil forays into hostile territory, but as this Saturday dawned for the energetic five-foot California native with a doctorate in international political economy, it was gut-check time. “They were afraid,” Rawlins later recalled. The chief, Lionel Rawlins, had gone to get the half-dozen security guards that Ensign was counting on to help her with a daring rescue mission, but the guards were asleep, or perhaps pretending to be, and couldn’t, or wouldn’t, be roused. Shortly before six o’clock in the morning on August 30, 2014, Margee Ensign, president of the American University of Nigeria, met with her security chief in the large house that she occupies on campus, in Yola, near the nation’s eastern border, in Adamawa State. ![]()
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