• Taraba community with no school, hospital, potable water
From Sylvanus Viashima, Jalingo
About 30 kilometres from Jalingo, capital of Taraba State, is Jegam Yapa (Dombi). The village is inhabited by about 100 Mumuye speaking families, who are largely illiterate farmers and at home with their ancestral land.
They live a life of nature devoid of electricity, potable water, schools, hospitals and government infrastructures. Majority of them have never boarded or driven a vehicle.
Almost all of them have never entered a classroom or visited a hospital facility before. Most of their women and girls look primitive in their attires, their teens walk about stark naked and innocent.
One of their greatest challenges is the absence of a school or any educational facility. In the past, it meant nothing to them because they had no need for Western education. But now, it matters to a few of them because they have “seen the light.”
Daily Sun gathered that due to lack of school, the community has the highest population of out-of-school age children in the state. Jerry Markus, a 13-year-old boy is not in school.
He recently travelled with his father to Jalingo to buy fertilizers.
He was amazed by the view of a different world from his rustic village setting. He saw streetlights illuminating the sky, cars, policemen at traffic posts and school children. The picture of this civilization altered his vision of reality and fired his ambition to go to school to become a policeman.
He told Daily Sun his experience: “I travelled with my father to Jalingo early this year to buy chemicals and fertilizer for our farm.
That was the first time that I left my home village. I saw a lot of police people on the road. I also saw a lot of cars and metal roofed houses.
“I saw a lot of beautiful places. I also saw a lot of children in school uniforms. So, when I came back, I told my father that I also wanted to go to school so that I can become a policeman.”
His encounter with civilization facilitated his love for education.
But he lamented that there was no way the dream could be realised:
“The problem sits on the fact that we don’t have a school in our village. Everyone goes to farm daily or just sits at the village centre to drink Burukutu (locally brewed beer) and gist.
“Yemzu Yenzu is a nearby village. It has a community school attended by pupils from the village and neighbouring villages. But it is miles apart from Jegam Yapa and almost impossible for anyone from here to attend the school.
“I keep disturbing my father, since the city visit to enrol me into a school. But he responded that they would soon get a teacher for our village school, that I should exercise patience. But I am running out of patience.”
Jegam Yapa community once erected some thatch houses and tents at the village square to serve as a school. But the teacher never showed up. One of the village heads, Jauro Daniel Mashi, said the school was built with the hope that government would provide it with teachers:
“If the government will give us teachers, we can donate our land for the school and help build the classes if the need arises. We want a school in this community because we don’t want our children to end up like us.”
Only recently, Governor Kefas Agbu declared a state of emergency on education. Whether this will mean the deployment of a school and teachers to this village is a matter of conjecture.
The plight of this community goes beyond the absence of educational facility. Its list of have-nots is long. Bekky Umaru once worked as an auxiliary nurse in Abuja. She said more than 80 per cent of births in the community were handled by untrained traditional birth attendants.
They used crude measures and methods: “Most of the over 100 childbearing women in the village have no access to antenatal services, not at all. The cost of antenatal service in the city is very high and discouraging to the villagers.
“Hence, they rarely ever think of going for antenatal attendance during pregnancy. Some women have died in the course of childbirth or of childbirth complication in the past and we have also lost children too.
“The nearest hospital to the village is located at Bamga Dutse. It is several kilometres. State government should intervene on the side of the community and bring it to light.”
The most reliable access to healthcare, Daily Sun gathered, is the regular visits by nurses under the Hard to Reach Medical Outreach program organised by UNICEF. Recently, the UNICEF in collaboration with GAVI provided motorcycles to ease movement of medical personnel to the community for routine immunization and other basic medical care.
One of the reasons for the seeming health issues noticed is that the community drinks from a pond. With no borehole or any other source of potable water, they rely on dropping one form of purification or the other before drinking.
But that has not been safe enough. Most of the people in the communityhave skin rashes, including the older ones, a situation which experts traced to the untreated water fetched from the ponds for drinking and bathing.