Missionary rescues Texas children abandoned in Nigeria for ten months

For seven critically ill and malnourished African-American children who were left nameless, penniless and abandoned in the poverty-stricken back streets of Ibadan, Nigeria, in Africa, it would take a miracle to make it back to America alive.

And that's precisely what they got.

Three boys and four girls, ages 8 to 16, who allegedly were abandoned in Nigeria for 10 months by their adoptive Texas mother, had to beg on the street for change to buy food, Nigerian officials said.

The mother, Mercury Liggins, reportedly left them with a businessman who in turn left them to be placed in a orphanage where they periodically went out to beg for food.

U.S. authorities believe the children arrived in Nigeria last October with Liggins, 47, whose fiance has a relative there. She then left to take a job as a food-service worker in U.S. military mess halls in Iraq, but quit in July, U.S. officials said.

Nigerian government workers and others who knew the children said she left them in the care of a businessman with a well-tended, two-story house in an affluent neighborhood of Ibadan. The nature of the relationship between Liggins and the businessman was not immediately known.

According to Ibadan Montessori officials, on October 16, the businessman drove to school and enrolled the children in classes with what they said was benefit money from the children's mother. "He claimed he was their guardian," principal Johnson Akintayo said. "They were put up in the boarding school."

But when the children returned after Christmas break, they appeared underfed and neglected, said Victoria Mustafa, matron of the girls boarding quarters. "They were very pale and had lost weight," she said.

They began begging classmates and staff for money, using it to buy food. Then the businessman began missing payments, and by July 22, all seven children had stopped attending, the principal said.

The children were discovered living on their own without the businessman and placed in an orphanage.

For months the children, unable to speak the native language, lingered between the streets and the orphanage. They were skinny, mosquito-bitten and suffering from malnutrition, malaria and typhoid, officials and other people said. "Three of them were sick. They could not walk," said a 23-year-old former ward of the orphanage now living there as a student. "They looked tired. They'd been sick and without food."

Their extraordinary odyssey ended only with the chance visit of a Texas missionary to the orphanage on Aug. 5.

Swarmed by children claiming to be from Texas, too, missionary Warren Beemer, a 34-year-old San Antonio youth minister, quizzed the brothers and sisters about the roster of the Houston Rockets basketball team as a test, according to an account from his church in San Antonio.

Eventually, the children proved their American citizenship by singing The Star-Spangled Banner. Beemer notified U.S. authorities who then got the youngsters home where they are now in Houston foster homes. The state agency that approved the adoptions and provided monthly support payments of $3,600 to Liggins is investigating the case.