My mother's Biafra story leaves me speechless.
When the war started, she was sent to Lagos to live with her older brother, a medical Dr at Lagos University Teaching Hospital.
She was enrolled in a Catholic secondary school in Yaba, Lagos
She was around 12 or 13. https://twitter.com/AdakuUfere/status/1055364711661912066

She attended an all girls school run by reverend sisters. For months, aside from fearing for the rest of her family back at home in the East, she felt relatively safer being in Lagos with her brother, his wife and their children.
All was as well as could be, until one day

While in school the reverend sisters came running into the classrooms, screaming for all the igbo students to come with them.
The school was under attack by busloads of armed soldiers/assailants, seeking to rape and kill the igbo female students.
She and a couple of

Igbo students were immediately rushed onto a bus, without their belongings, without a word to their families, and driven all the way to Ghana.
My mother spent the next 5 years in Ghana, completing her education.
And the craziest part is, until she returned after she graduated

Her family had no idea where she was.
They believed she had been killed in the school raid.
She was a kid when she left, had just been Learning english when she moved to Lagos, so she had no idea how to contact her family for years.
It hurts to imagine her trauma.

She only told us this story in our adulthood, and she only gives us little bits and pieces and closes up about her life in Ghana, disconnected from her family.
My sweet mama went through it, painful to imagine.

My mother was SUPER insistent on making sure we learned English first before the igbo language, while raising us in Lagos. She wanted our english to have no discernable igbo in it.
She never lost her fear of sounding igbo in Lagos because of what it cost her.