Risking it all to get home for Christmas: Mabel's scary journey

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The prompt about traveling home for the holidays and being held up in traffic inspired me to write about a recent event. It's not one that involves a normal traffic hold up, it was a hold up for security reasons.

Hello Hive fam! Meet my sister. Her name is Mabel, she's my immediate younger sister. We share a very good bond together. I love all my siblings and we bond very well, but it's different with Mabel. We are so close that she served as maid of honor at my wedding.

She gained admission into the university when I was rounding up my studies in the same university, that's Kaduna state University, in Northern Nigeria. When she came to uni, we lived together and shared everything we had together. This probably explains why we are so close.

Mabel just completed her university studies as well and had to travel home for a while to wait for the final results to be out. The results came out and she aced her courses, so she traveled back for her clearance and to get her statement of results.

She did get to do all that but she stayed back to catch up with friends and have some good time before returning home. Well, from the videos she shared with me, I would say that she had great fun. Finally she decided to travel home on Tuesday. She wanted to go home in preparation for the Christmas and new year celebrations already. She told me this on Monday and we agreed that she would leave very early to avoid traveling late because of the security issues.

The journey from the city to our home town is a three hours journey, even though it is in the same State. We agreed that she was going to take off at ten o'clock in the morning, but she had a couple of delays which made her unable to reach the park until 3pm.

At the park, there was another delay because there were no passengers traveling towards home. This made her to wait until around 5:30pm before their bus finally took off. I tried to convince her not to take the trip because it was already late in the evening and it was not safe to travel, but she had made up her mind to travel that day, so my efforts were vain.

The first half of the journey is usually the most risky because there is a lot of vast areas of land that form bushes around, so bandits and terrorists hide out in those areas. And even though there's a lot of military checkpoints on the road, these bandits sometimes block the road and either rob travelers or in most cases, kidnap them for huge ransom.

It is because of this that it is very risky to travel in the evening. It is also because of this that I was so worried when Mabel told me that they took off at 5:30pm. Though I was worried, I just let it be since I couldn't change anything.

Thankfully she arrived safe, but she sent me a picture of a long hold up and according to her explanation, they got to one of the checkpoints and were made to stop because there was an attack on the road ahead

Usually when it happens, the military personnel at the checkpoints send men to neutralize the bandits while some are left to halt movement until it is safe to pass.

They finally got cleared to pass and Mabel said she was so scared especially when they got to scene of the incident. According to her, only one vehicle was attacked and the victims were been rushed to the hospital.