Two Abducted American Girls Reunited with Mothers in United States
Published: April 7, 2006
When Chioma Meme was less than a year old, her father took her to Nigeria, under the guise of visiting her grandmother before she died, and never returned her to her African-born mother, Mabel Mucbah, in Seattle.
The same thing happened to Sahra when she was 18 months old. Her father took her to Somalia to be raised by his family and never returned her to her mother, Hukun Mohamud, living in Minnesota.
Because both girls were born in the United States and are U.S. citizens, eventually the mothers contacted the State Department’s Office of Children’s Issues and finally in February they got their children back, each now age 17.
Much drama transpired before the return, however. Chioma’s mother, Mabel Mucbah, speaking by phone to the Washington File, said Chioma’s father’s sister, who had Chioma, initially wrote her from Nigeria and then stopped all communication. When Mucbah phoned and wrote letters, the sister said Chioma no longer lived there. However, the letter from Mucbah asking if Chioma was there contained an e-mail address.
“So one day Chioma was looking around the house and she found a box under the bed and when she opened it, she saw the letter” telling her that Mabel Mucbah, her birth mother, was looking for her, Mucbah said. That was the first time she knew who her birth mother was - “all she knew before was that the lady [keeping her] said she was her mother. So Chioma e-mailed us here [in Seattle] and said, ‘I’m Chioma. I’m the one you’re talking about,’” recalls Mucbah.
Mucbah’s niece e-mailed Chioma and eventually they got in touch by telephone.
Mucbah recounted: “When I was talking to Chioma on the line, she [the aunt] came and took the phone and I could hear Chioma screaming, running and crying. … The aunt said, ‘No, Chioma is not leaving.’ I called Chioma another time and told her I would send money. I had a friend here who had a friend in Lagos, and I asked [the friend in Lagos] to go to Port Harcourt and get Chioma from the aunt. I sent money to the friend and she went halfway, and Chioma got on the bus and went halfway to another city - and both of them went to Lagos and [Chioma] was in Lagos when I started running after her papers.”
Chioma’s mother then sent money for the daughter to go to the U.S. Embassy in Lagos to request a DNA test, “which they did, and said, ‘Yes, she is your daughter.’ When she knew for sure I was her mother, I wanted to go to Nigeria to get her, but Chioma advised me not to go there because she said they might do something to me.”
“It was terrible all those years,” says Mabel Mucbah. “Chioma just turned 17 March 21. She’s very happy here. I don’t think she misses them. She’s going to the community college. She took a placement test and passed, so she will go to college tomorrow for orientation.”
Chioma called her father, who is living in New York, and “he said he would help her and he would do this and that, but to this day he hasn’t done anything,” says Mucbah.
Hukun Mohamud’s Somali former husband, father of Sahra, is also in the United States. Sahra will be 17 on April 6. Currently, she speaks only Somali, so she will have more difficulty fitting in until she learns English. Her mother is taking precautions to protect her daughter.
The agent who helped the reunions is Kathie Baker of the State Department’s Office of Children’s Issues. Both girls’ airfare home was paid by the U.S. government through a small government funding program in the Justice Department’s Office of Victims of Crime. The Consulate in Nairobi also assisted.
Baker’s office also has handled cases where African mothers abduct their American children from their African husbands. Baker says: “I had two cases very much alike. Two women both had twins and both women had to have in-vitro fertilization, the fathers covering the cost of that. Both women abducted their twins, one to the Democratic Republic of Congo, one to Nigeria. Now both sets of twins are back in the United States. The FBI arrested both mothers.”
Baker says of her job, “It’s very challenging, stimulating, discouraging and interesting. And it can be very exciting because when children come back, you feel like you really helped someone.”
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