Little Strength

Davou Gyang farms maize on the Jos Plateau and pastors a tin-roofed church because nobody else stayed. He is slow-spoken, certain he is not the gifted one — and his church keeps outgrowing its benches, because the displaced keep arriving.

Then a frightened world exhales behind a single calm voice on the radio, and the raids that have shadowed the Plateau for years simply stop. Into the quiet comes a kind new order — registration, a safe corridor that will carry verified persons of faith out of the violence, and then a clean new money. His brightest young catechist believes deliverance has come. His brother in Abuja says only: think of your children.

Davou cannot say why he is afraid of a mercy this real. He knows only that the door set before him may not be a way out — and that staying may be the last thing he has to give.