By Dionne Searcey

New York Times

MAIDUGURI, Nigeria >> Her hometown, the birthplace of Boko Haram, is filled with sad stories.

Fati Abubakar roams the streets to find the happy ones.

It is not always easy.

With a camera slung over her shoulder, Abubakar, 30, documents the people of Maiduguri, a busy capital in northeastern Nigeria, determined to show the world that life continues despite years of violence that has killed thousands of people, many in the city limits.

Inspired by Instagram accounts like @humansofny, which captures the lives of New Yorkers “one story at a time,” Abubakar snaps portraits of vendors, refugees and students, posting them to Instagram at @bitsofborno with quotations or captions that describe them.

Boko Haram has affected nearly all of her subjects in some way.

“When they say there’s an insurgency here, people assume it’s nothing but death and despair,” Abubakar said. “I want to change the image. You can see, everyday life continues.”

In Maiduguri, she has become somewhat of a celebrity. Civilian vigilante militia members posted in the city to guard against Boko Haram look out for her, beating back children who flock to her as she goes about her work.

“Bits of Borno! Bits of Borno!” a group of boys who follow her Instagram account shouted to her this month as she walked past the pool table where they were gathered. Fans of having their photos taken, they were happily indulged by her.

Abubakar gracefully wove through the crowded, chaotic Monday Market in the middle of the city as though she had wheels instead of feet under her long orange and yellow dress. Carts overflowed with onions, watermelons, peanuts, bars of soap and popcorn.

She stopped to snap a photo of a man selling flour from a wheelbarrow, white streaks across his face and hands.

“We never get anything from the government,” he complained. “No water, no electricity.” The wind picked up and blew away some of his flour. Abubakar moved on.

She photographed two boys, both named Abba, wearing giant straw hats. Then she squatted to speak with a beggar, an older man in a satiny white robe sitting on a bridge over a dry riverbed covered with garbage.

She takes down all their stories in curlicue handwriting in her square notebook after asking the same simple question: How is life in Maiduguri?

“Everything is expensive,” said Zanab Abubakar (no relation to Fati Abubakar), a market shopper who came to buy food and resell it elsewhere.

Fati Abubakar took her photo and sighed, putting down her notebook.

“That’s the general theme you hear,” she said. “Even if you’re looking for happy stories.”

Usually the happiest stories come from children. And so @bitsofborno, named because Maiduguri is the capital of Borno state, is rife with photos of children playing in a swing, beaming in newly donated clothing and standing alongside a friend with arms slung around each other.

Abubakar, a slender woman with a soft voice and sharp points of view, remembers the Maiduguri of her youth as a happy place where she went to school, weddings and parties with neighbors.

“It was a very peaceful, quaint small town,” she said.

But in the mid- to late 2000s, when she was in her 20s, the insurgency began to seize Maiduguri. A firebrand named Mohammed Yusuf had been preaching in one of the neighborhoods, his speeches denouncing Western education becoming more and more radical. Abubakar recalls women starting to dress more conservatively, with gowns that stretched to the ground. Yusuf’s cultlike teachings formed the genesis of Boko Haram.

Neighbors killed neighbors. Sons ran off to join the militants, while other sons were killed by the group. Gunshots and explosions were common throughout the city.

Nigerian soldiers responded with heavy force, blasting away at the group and eventually routing much of the movement in 2009. Yusuf, the group’s founder, was killed in police custody. It seemed that Boko Haram had been defeated.

But the insurgency was far from over. Boko Haram members fled to the countryside from Maiduguri, which back then had about 2 million inhabitants. Villagers seeking safety from the group began pouring in, by some estimates doubling the city’s population. The desperate newcomers camped out in large groups in hospitals or college campuses, where they remain, living in squalor. The city would never be the same.

During the most violent parts of the insurgency in Maiduguri, Abubakar’s parents — her mother is a civil servant, her father a businessman — sent her to London for schooling. While there, she obsessively tracked the news. Hearing what people were saying about her hometown was depressing.

“Everyone focused on the trauma,” she said. “They were labeling us as post-traumatic-stress civilians. But when I came home, I saw people were bouncing back.”

Abubakar wanted to show the humanity in Maiduguri when she returned. Her photos tell stories of residents’ hard journeys to safety from their home villages and the difficulties of living in crowded Maiduguri, where there are few jobs.

But many posts are hopeful.

“I’ve been living in Maiduguri for 30 years. I love the town because of how peaceful it was before the insurgency. But because of the attacks, it has lost some of its peaceful nature. So many were killed,” reads the lengthy caption under a photo of a woman listed only as Mrs. Chidinma, pictured slouching in her shiny dress. “But still, forget the insurgency issue for a minute, we love this place. We love the people.”

Some residents are confused by Abubakar. For starters, she is not married in a region where girls marry as teenagers. And she often walks around town by herself, a risk in an area where out-of-place women are suspected of being suicide bombers.

Older women who see her roaming the city often tsk-tsk her, thinking she has no job or ambition.

“They think I should be married and have kids, that I’m wandering aimless,” said Abubakar, who has a day job at an aid group. She has an undergraduate degree in nursing and a graduate degree in public health from London South Bank University.

But most of all, people are baffled by the young Muslim daughter of Maiduguri who takes photographs. Local journalists said they could recall no other female Nigerian photographer in Borno state, and few in the entire nation.

As it picks up a following, Abubakar’s work is starting to lead to help for the people she photographs. Some of her followers in recent weeks have sent donations of cash and clothing to subjects whose stories she tells.

“You can see some good coming from this,” she said.

© 2016 The New York Times Company