Key Points

• Armed herdsmen stormed Martina Atom’s farm in Mbagwen Udei, severed her hand with a machete and left her for dead in the mud.
• Eight years later, Martina raises four children alone in Daudu II IDP camp in Guma, Benue, sifting grain scraps from market floors to feed them.
• Her children are not in school, her husband abandoned the family, and she says fear of fresh attacks makes returning home impossible.

The rain was already falling when the armed men came.

Martina Atom was working her farm in Mbagwen Udei, Benue State, the way she had done countless times before. She was 45, a mother of four, trying to coax enough from the soil to feed her children.

Then the shooting started, and the screaming, and the world she had built over four decades came apart in the space of a few seconds.

She ran. The wet ground betrayed her. She slipped.

One of the attackers caught up. As he raised his machete, Martina lifted her hand to protect her head. The blade came down.

“The machete landed on my hand and chopped off my hand,” she said, fighting back tears.

She collapsed into the mud, bleeding. The men stood over her and argued. Some wanted to finish the job. In the end, they walked away, satisfied she would die where she fell.

She did not die.

Martina dragged herself up from the mud, found her severed hand lying nearby and carried it back to her village. She handed it to her son, who had survived the attack, to bury.

“That is how I have been living with one hand,” she said.

Eight years in a camp

That afternoon in Mbagwen Udei was eight years ago. Martina has not been home since.

She lives now in a cramped shelter at the Daudu II Internally Displaced Persons camp in Guma Local Government Area, one of thousands of families who fled persistent attacks across Benue’s communities and have not been able to go back. Her left arm ends in a neatly wrapped stump.

Her four children, the eldest 13, the youngest seven, were small when they fled. They are growing up inside a displacement camp.

Her husband left. She does not know where he is.

“Without my husband, life in the camp is survival reduced to its barest form,” she said.

With one hand, Martina cannot farm the way she once did. She cannot carry heavy loads. To feed her children, she walks to local markets and waits.

When traders finish measuring and bagging rice, maize or millet, she crouches over the swept-aside grain and sifts through what they have discarded, separating stones and dirt from anything edible with a single hand.

“I go to the markets. I sift what they reject. From that, I get something edible,” she said.

Some days there is enough. Some days there is nothing.

A mother’s grief measured in classrooms

What weighs on Martina most is not her arm. It is the sight of her children aging without school uniforms, textbooks or classrooms.

Her eldest son should be in secondary school. Instead, he fetches water and watches over his younger siblings inside the camp. The younger children move about the grounds with nowhere particular to go.

“Even my children are not attending school,” she said. “Life has not been easy for us in the camp.”

She wants to go home. She says she cannot.

Reports of fresh attacks keep circulating among displaced families in Benue. Many of the villages people fled are still occupied. The calculation is not simply one of courage. It is one of survival.

“We cannot return home,” Martina said. “The armed herders are still in our community.”

Her story is one of many playing out across IDP camps in Benue State, where years of attacks by armed groups have left tens of thousands displaced, many of them women and children with no clear path back to the lives they had before.

What Martina says she wants is not complicated. Safety. Her children in school. The chance to return to Mbagwen Udei without fear of machetes or gunfire. The chance to farm again, even with one hand.

“I cannot return now with my children,” she said. “But I am praying.”