In an interview with the Thompson Reuters Foundation published on Tuesday, the first of more than 200 abducted Chibok schoolgirls to be rescued from Boko Haram after two years in captivity, said she simply wants to go home.

 

Amina Ali and her four-month-old baby were rescued in May near Damboa in Borno state by soldiers and a civilian vigilante group. Since then she has the federal government has kept her in a house in Abuja, carrying out a “restoration process” on her.

 

“I just want to go home – I don’t know about school,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “I will decide about school when I get back, but I have no idea when I will be going home,” Ali said.

 

Ali spoke to the Thomson Reuters Foundation days after the Islamist group published a video showing dozen of the girls.

 

In the video published by the militants on social media on Sunday, a masked man stands behind a group of the girls, and says some of their classmates have been killed in air strikes.

 

While Ali had not heard about the video, she said Boko Haram had told the abducted girls that everyone was looking for them.

 

“I think about them a lot – I would tell them to be hopeful and prayerful,” Ali said. “In the same way God rescued me, he will also rescue them.”

 

Ali, who was found by the army in May along with a suspected Boko Haram militant, Mohammed Hayatu, claiming to be her husband, said she was unhappy to have been separated from the father of her four-month-old baby girl.

 

“I want him to know that I am still thinking about him,” Ali said, relaxing and lifting her gaze off the ground only to breastfeed her child when she was brought into the room to feed.

 

“Just because we got separated, that does not mean that I don’t think about him,” Ali added.

 

Ali’s mother, Binta, spent two months with her daughter before going home to Chibok. She said last month she feared for Ali’s future.

 

She said her daughter had wanted to further her education before being kidnapped, but now she was afraid of school and wanted a sewing machine to start a business of clothes making.

 

Ali told her mother earlier this month that the girls, who are being held in Sambisa forest, were starved and resorted to eating raw maize, and that some had died in captivity, suffered broken legs or gone deaf after being too close to explosions.

 

Her mother said she had observed a positive change in Ali since her rescue, as she now slept much more peacefully than she had ever done before being abducted.

 

“I am not scared of Boko Haram – they are not my God,” Ali said.