Shocking images have emerged showing an emaciated two-year-old Nigerian boy, riddled with worms and reportedly abandoned by his family because they thought he was a witch, being given water by an aid worker.
He had lived on the streets of Uyo in Akwa Ibom State for eight months, surviving on scraps and whatever he could find, before being discovered by Anja Ringgren Lovén, the Danish founder of the African Children’s Aid Education and Development Foundation (ACAEDF).
In the pictures – which went viral online bringing in 1 million Danish Krone (£104,000) from well-wishers – she is seen helping him drink water.
She then wrapped the boy in a blanket and took him to the nearest hospital.
After two days of care, she wrote that his condition had greatly improved.
“He’s taking food for himself, and he responds to the medicine he gets,” she wrote in a blog post. “Today he has had powers to sit up and smiling at us. He’s a strong little boy. To see him sit and play with my own son is without doubt the greatest experience of my life! I just don’t know how to describe it in words.”
She added that she had named the boy Hope (a word she has tattooed on her knuckles).
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Ms Lovén set up her charity three years ago to help children accused of being witches. She said it was problem with wide-reaching effects.
“Thousands of children are being accused of being witches and we’ve both seen torture of children, dead children and frightened children,” she wrote in a Facebook post accompanying the pictures of Hope.
“This footage shows why I fight. Why I sold everything I own.”
She said that Hope was battling worms but added that he would soon be well enough to join the other children she looks after in Uyo.
Hope is just one of dozens of children who Anja has dedicated her life to help. Three years ago, Anja decided to set up her charity in Nigeria to support children who had been accused of being witches.
She told the Huffington Post UK: “I travelled alone to Nigeria where I met children who had been tortured and beaten almost to death because they were accused of being witches and therefore left alone on the street.
“What I saw were so barbaric and terrible and it left a deep impression on me.
“That’s why I decided to sell everything I owned in Denmark to devote my time and life to help ‘witch children’ in Nigeria.”
With her partner, David, Anja now runs a children’s home for young people accused of witchcraft.
The couple, who have a two-year-old son together, currently have 34 children living in their care, all of whom have been accused of witchcraft.
Anja said: “When children are being tortured and abused and left alone on the street, it gives a child a lot of terrible trauma they carry around inside.
“Being rejected by your own family must be the loneliest feeling a child can experience, and I don’t believe that anyone can imagine how that must feel like.”
ACAEDF also works to ensure that all children in the southern Nigerian state of Akwa Ibom have the opportunity to go to school.
Anja says that “education is the key in the fight against superstition” and believes that the charity has a responsibility to work with the local people.
She said: “We rescue and we give love and support to the vulnerable children accused of witchcraft in Akwa Ibom. But to put an end to superstition, exorcism and black magic performed by pastors and the so-called witchdoctors advocacy work must be carried out.
“We work on the human nature that every child in the world has the right to food and education, and to live a dignified life.
“Our values consist of showing sheer compassion, care and love for those who need it the most and through that create confidence.”
