It was a touching scene early Wednesday morning as a five year old male child, identified simply as Chidera, drowned while swimming in the Atimaka stream, a tributary emptying into the Cross River in Ikom, Cross River Central.
Helen Takon, an Ikom resident who spoke with www.calitown.com, late this evening, explained that the young lad had gone to the river in the company of his mother who ekes a living, scooping and selling sand from the stream, when he sauntered off with his playmates. His mother, hard at work scooping sand is believed to have been alerted when the stream’s current swept the child away. Frantic efforts made by sympathizers to rescue the boy yielded no positives as he drowned before help could reach him.
Takon described the unfortunate incident on her Facebook page thus: “What a sudden, painful, miserable, dirty, untimely, unfulfilled, destiny cut short…”
Chidera’s mother, a widow with two kids we gathered, has just lost the eldest of two children by this drowning. The victim has since been buried.
