Twelve days after I shut myself away in my apartment, my mobile phone rang. It was Moustapha. “My brother, how you doin’’” he said. I told him I wasn’t doing too well. He was stuck in his apartment on the other side of the city, too. And he told me that my girlfriend, Alexis, had called him from the US, frantic with worry about me.
When we spoke again the next day Moustapha told me that our team president, Mr Ahmed, had promised to get us out of the country. We had to make our way to his office – it was only two blocks from my apartment, but I wasn’t sure how I would get there. “I will see you or I won’t,” I told Moustapha. “I will make it or I won’t.”
I was so weak that it took me about 15 minutes to climb down the seven flights of stairs in my apartment building. Out on the street I saw the empty shell cases that had been fired at the crowd two weeks earlier. I picked one up and thought, “Did this go through a human being’”
They weren’t like handgun bullets – they were the sort of thing that could take a limb off.
Then I saw those same kids I had watched from my window, the ones I had played football with – one had an AK-47 that was almost bigger than him. They recognised me and called out: “Okocha!” They called me that because they thought I looked like Jay-Jay Okocha, the Nigerian footballer.
These kids saw my legs start to buckle and they raced to grab my arms. Two of them took my arms and I made them understand where I needed to get to. They basically had to carry me for about a mile. We went the long way, down backstreets and alleyways.
Sometimes they would break into a run, and sometimes one of the kids would shout and we all stopped dead and looked around. At my team president’s office, Moustapha and I hugged, and Mr Ahmed told the two of us, “I could get you out of here, but it’s going to be very dangerous.”
He said it would mean a six-hour drive on a long desert road to the Egyptian border.