MAIDUGURI, Nigeria: Nobel Peace laureate Malala Yousafzai was greeted with cheers Tuesday by dozens of young women in northeastern Nigeria, where she spoke out for the many girls abducted under Boko Haram’s deadly insurgency.
The 20-year-old Pakistani activist told The Associated Press she was excited by the courage of the young women who are undaunted as they pursue an education amid one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises.
“This is part of my girl power trip, visiting many parts of the world,” said Yousafzai, who also met with the freed Chibok schoolgirls taken in a mass abduction by Boko Haram more than three years ago. “I am here now because of the Nigerian girls. Fighting for them and speaking up for them.”
Yousafzai visited internally displaced camps in and around the city of Maiduguri, where thousands have sheltered from Boko Haram’s violence. The extremist group continues to carry out deadly attacks there, often using young female suicide bombers.
“They have lived in the period of extremism,” Yousafzai said of the young women around her. Many have seen family members killed.
Yousafzai was 15 when she shot in the head by Taliban militants in 2012, targeted due to her advocacy for women’s education.
The Nobel winner said her Nigeria visit was significant because it was the partial fulfillment of what she advocated the last time she was there. In 2014, she pressed then-President Goodluck Jonathan to ensure the rescue of the more than 200 abducted Chibok schoolgirls.
On Monday, Yousafzai met with more than 100 who have since been rescued and now stay in the capital, Abuja, for what the government calls rehabilitation.
While she told the AP she shared their joy at being freed, she said she was not happy that the girls haven’t been allowed to reunite fully with their families.
She said she hopes they will “live with their family, live a normal life.”
Many others remain in Boko Haram captivity, “and the government must unite so that they should make sure that these girls are released,” Yousafzai said.
“Boko Haram themselves should learn that in Islam, such things are unacceptable,” she added. “This is against humanity, this is against Islam.”
Yousafzai also met Monday with acting President Yemi Osinbajo, speaking up for the more than 10 million children displaced by Boko Haram and pressing for the declaration of a state of emergency for education in Nigeria.
She also urged the international community to address the crisis in the country’s northeast.
Girls at the internally displaced camps said the Nobel winner’s story of courage gave them inspiration for a brighter future.
“Her story give us hope, that’s why we too want to go to school and become something in life,” said 15-year-old Fatima Ali. “We have to bear all pains like hunger to go to school. We barely eat once a day here. We have not eaten since morning because government people no longer bring us food for about two months now.”
Three million children in Nigeria’s northeast are in need of support to keep learning, according to the UN children’s agency. Nearly 1,400 schools have been destroyed during Boko Haram’s insurgency, which began in 2009, and more than 2,295 teachers have been killed, the agency says.
Ali said she was in school when Boko Haram attacked her town three years ago. “I want to become a soldier so that I could help my community to fight and kill Boko Haram, because they are not good people,” she said.
Another student, 15-year-old Fatima Grema, said she sees herself in Yousafzai.
“Boko Haram abducted me and wanted to marry me,” she said. After being taken from the town of Baga to a location near the Cameroon border, “I later managed to escape,” she said. “I was not in school until I came to the camp here.”
Grema said she now wants to become a teacher.
UNICEF’s country representative Mohamed Malick Fall said Yousafzai’s visit is a symbol of hope, and “we will do everything in our power to make sure all children can keep learning.”
Nobel winner Malala in Nigeria, speaks out against Boko Haram
Nobel winner Malala in Nigeria, speaks out against Boko Haram
‘Extremely exciting’: the ice cores that could help save glaciers
- Thousands of glaciers will vanish each year in the coming decades, leaving only a fraction standing by the end of the century, a study says
- On the other hand, some glaciers have not only resisted melting, but even slightly grown, a phenomenon called the ‘Pamir-Karakoram anomaly’
SAPPORO: Dressed in an orange puffer jacket, Japanese scientist Yoshinori Iizuka stepped into a storage freezer to retrieve an ice core he hopes will help experts protect the world’s disappearing glaciers.
The fist-sized sample drilled from a mountaintop is part of an ambitious international effort to understand why glaciers in Tajikistan have resisted the rapid melting seen almost everywhere else.
“If we could learn the mechanism behind the increased volume of ice there, then we may be able to apply that to all the other glaciers around the world,” potentially even helping revive them, said Iizuka, a professor at Hokkaido University.
“That may be too ambitious a statement. But I hope our study will ultimately help people,” he said.
Thousands of glaciers will vanish each year in the coming decades, leaving only a fraction standing by the end of the century unless global warming is curbed, a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change showed Monday.
Earlier this year, AFP exclusively accompanied Iizuka and other scientists through harsh conditions to a site at an altitude of 5,810 meters (about 19,000 feet) on the Kon-Chukurbashi ice cap in the Pamir Mountains.
The area is the only mountainous region on the planet where glaciers have not only resisted melting, but even slightly grown, a phenomenon called the “Pamir-Karakoram anomaly.”
The team drilled two ice columns approximately 105 meters (345 feet) long out of the glacier.
One will be stored in an underground sanctuary in Antarctica belonging to the Ice Memory Foundation, which supported the Tajikistan expedition along with the Swiss Polar Institute.
The other was shipped to Iizuka’s facility, the Institute of Low Temperature Science at Hokkaido University in Sapporo, where the team is hunting clues on why precipitation in the region increased over the last century, and how the glacier has resisted melting.
Some link the anomaly to the area’s cold climate or even increased use of agricultural water in Pakistan that creates more vapor.
But the ice cores are the first opportunity to examine the anomaly scientifically.
‘ANCIENT ICE’
“Information from the past is crucial,” said Iizuka.
“By understanding the causes behind the continuous build-up of snow from the past to the present, we can clarify what will happen going forward and why the ice has grown.”
Since the samples arrived in November, his team has worked in freezing storage facilities to log the density, alignment of snow grains, and the structure of ice layers.
In December, when AFP visited, the scientists were kitted out like polar explorers to cut and shave ice samples in the comparatively balmy minus 20C of their lab.
The samples can tell stories about weather conditions going back decades, or even centuries.
A layer of clear ice indicates a warm period when the glacier melted and then refroze, while a low-density layer suggests packed snow, rather than ice, which can help estimate precipitation.
Brittle samples with cracks, meanwhile, indicate snowfall on half-melted layers that then refroze.
And other clues can reveal more information — volcanic materials like sulfate ions can serve as time markers, while water isotopes can reveal temperatures.
The scientists hope that the samples contain material dating back 10,000 years or more, though much of the glacier melted during a warm spell around 6,000 years ago.
Ancient ice would help scientists answer questions such as “what kind of snow was falling in this region 10,000 years ago? What was in it?” Iizuka said.
“We can study how many and what kinds of fine particles were suspended in the atmosphere during that ice age,” he added.
“I really hope there is ancient ice.”
SECRETS IN THE ICE
For now, the work proceeds slowly and carefully, with team members like graduate student Sora Yaginuma carefully slicing samples apart.
“An ice core is an extremely valuable sample and unique,” said Yaginuma.
“From that single ice core, we perform a variety of analyzes, both chemical and physical.”
The team hopes to publish its first findings next year and will be doing “lots of trial-and-error” work to reconstruct past climate conditions, Iizuka said.
The analysis in Hokkaido will uncover only some of what the ice has to share, and with the other samples preserved in Antarctica, there will be opportunities for more research.
For example, he said, scientists could look for clues about how mining in the region historically affected the area’s air quality, temperature and precipitation.
“We can learn how the Earth’s environment has changed in response to human activities,” Iizuka said.
With so many secrets yet to learn, the work is “extremely exciting,” he added.
