Beauty Beyond Displacement

Ojonugwa Yahya braids the hair of a girl at the IDP Camp

 By Ojonugwa Yahya

Partner Contribution: This article was written by CoHuman (Collective Humanity Development Network) and is published here by Shades of Us as part of our partnership to amplify stories and perspectives that advance justice, human rights, and social change. Thank you.

There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a child while her hair is being braided. Her shoulders drop. Her eyes soften, sometimes close. Someone's hands are on her head, moving slowly, deliberately, with care. For a few minutes, nothing is being asked of her. She is simply being tended to.

We see this every time we visit the IDP settlements at Durumi, New Kuchingoro, and IDP Camp Wassa as part of our Bonding Session. Amid the dust, the makeshift shelters, and the noise of children playing between corrugated walls, our team sits down with combs, oil, and thread, and we braid hair.

It looks like a small thing. It is not.

What Displacement Takes

When a family is displaced, the losses are counted in the obvious ways: a home, a farm, a school, a community. But there is a subtler loss that rarely makes it into reports or funding proposals. Displacement can quietly convince a child that she is less than she was. That her story now begins and ends with the word ‘displaced.’

We have sat with children through storytelling circles, shared meals, and hygiene education sessions long enough to notice this pattern. Displacement does not just take a roof. It can take a girl's sense of who she is.

Why We Braid

So we braid hair. Not as an add-on to the ‘real’ work of psychosocial healing, but as part of it.

In many African communities, hair braiding has never been just about hair. It is a ritual of closeness between women and girls, an inheritance passed down through generations, a quiet celebration of beauty and dignity. Mothers braid daughters. Sisters braid sisters. Friends braid friends. It is one of the oldest forms of care we have.

When we braid a displaced girl's hair, we are saying something we cannot always say in words: we see you. We are journeying with you. Your story did not end when you were uprooted from home.

Displacement is something that happened to her. It is not who she is. Beneath it, she still carries a full identity: a personality, a sense of humor, dreams, a story that belongs entirely to her. Our work is to help her remember that, and to remind the world of it too.

Small Acts, Real Resistance

There is something quietly defiant about insisting on beauty and dignity inside a displacement corridor. It would be easier, in some ways, to treat these children only as cases to be managed, needs to be met, statistics to be reported. But we have chosen a different posture. We choose to sit down, take our time, and braid.

Every plait is an act of resistance against the idea that displacement gets the final word. Every session says: you are still worthy of care, of beauty, of being seen fully, not as a displaced child, but as a child, full stop.

The Story We Want the World to See

Too often, the story told about displaced communities stops at hardship. We want to add to that story, not replace it, but widen it. Yes, these children have endured displacement. And also: they laugh, they play, they sit patiently while their hair is braided into intricate patterns, they carry resilience that many adults would struggle to summon.

That resilience deserves to be seen as clearly as the hardship is.

Through Bonding Sessions, and through small rituals like hair braiding, we are trying to give the world a fuller picture: one where displaced girls are not defined only by what they have lost, but celebrated for everything they still carry. Their beauty. Their identity. Their story, still being written, still theirs to tell.

We will keep sitting down. We will keep braiding. And we will keep journeying with them, for as long as it takes.

About the Writer

Ojonugwa Yahaya is a humanitarian storyteller, documentary photographer, and Founder/Executive Director of CoHuman, a Nigerian nonprofit supporting displaced communities across IDP settlements in Abuja.