Toddler on three-day sojourn

Boso-Nyamea (B/A), Oct. 23, GNA - Shock gripped residents of Boso-Nyamea, a farming community on the Ghana-Cote d'Ivoire border near Kofi Badukrom in the Dormaa District when on October 1, this year, a one-and-a-half year-old boy suddenly re-appeared after a three-day sojourn.

According to the boy's mother, Madam Adwoa Lobi, her family members had declared the boy missing after a fruitless search for him for three days.


In an interview with the Ghana News Agency (GNA) at Boso-Nyamea, Madam Lobi said she paid a visit to her relatives in the village in September as she occasionally did from a nearby Ivorian village where she lived.


She said on September 29 she left the boy under the care of his sisters who were playing behind the family house while she responded to an urgent call in the neighbourhood.


Madam Lobi said she returned a few minutes later only to discover that her son was nowhere to be found.


"In utter dismay and confusion, I raised the alarm and my family and other members of the village instantly constituted a search party, which scanned all nooks and crannies of the nearby bushes for three consecutive days without finding any trace of the boy", Madam Lobi said.

Madam Lobi said on the third day when her family was at a meeting to dispatch a delegation to the boy's father, a woman emerged from the main gate of the house with the boy in her hand smiling as he saw his mother.


The family, according to Madam Lobi, initially mistook the bearer of the baby popularly known by the villagers as Sister Yaa for a baby thief and even threatened to prefer legal action against her for attempting to steal the boy.


Madam Lobi said her relatives, however, rescinded the threat after the suspected "baby thief" had narrated how she came by the boy. According to Sister Yaa, she and her seven-year-old son went to the farm late that Thursday to collect some foodstuffs.


Sister Yaa said on reaching the farm, they realized a strange movement in the bush ahead of them reminiscent of the approach of an animal.


She said she held her cutlass in readiness to attack if an animal should emerge from the bush but rather found to her dismay that the "animal" was a fellow human being.

Sister Yaa said the boy crawled amid laughter towards her and finally stretched both arms signifying the desire to be lifted from the ground.


Madam Lobi's family members who confirmed the story told the GNA that a delegation to sister Yaa's farm the following day found that okro, tomatoes, pepper and garden eggs were arranged systematically on several yam mounds on the farm.


This, they claimed, was an indication that dwarfs might have engaged the boy on his three-day sojourn.