It’s a crackly telephone line from Chibok in remote Borno state where there’s a state of emergency and where even Nigeria’s President, Goodluck Jonathan, appears reluctant to go due to the danger from insurgents.
But I can clearly hear the anxiety in this father’s voice at the other end.
“We are angry, very, very angry,” Shettima Haruna says. “We are needing the government to go and take the American people to come and help us.
“We have not heard from my daughter for three weeks now.”
No one has heard from the 267 girls abducted from their school by Boko Haram terrorists almost a month ago. The sense of fear and trepidation about their fate is almost unbearable.
I may be 3,000 miles from my UK home – in a different land with different customs and habits – but some things are constants around the globe, and one of those is the love for your children.
While I talk to Shettima, his anger and impotence are palpable.
He is furious with others, the government which had done almost nothing to locate his daughter.
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Emergency: President Mr Jonathan
He is furious with himself, frustrated that he could do nothing to fulfil the unwritten parents’ contract of protecting your offspring.
I thought back to the last connection with my own three daughters before I set out here to Nigeria.
It was Tuesday and the sort of moments with your family that you dream about – presents, cake and laughter on the 12th birthday of my youngest child, Florence. It seemed almost selfish just to think about it.
I also imagined two other little girls playing around in Nigeria. The pair of innocents skipping in my mind were me and my sister, Gerry. Coming back to Nigeria has been surreal as this is the place where my parents met by almost impossible chance and married.
My father Max was a civil engineer out to see the world from small-town Scotland when his eye came across Emma, the half-Chinese woman who had purchased a one-way ticket on a mail boat to see if Africa really was more exotic than Wimbledon.
Max and Em are no longer with us, but the love for the Dark Continent, which began with my childhood in Nigeria, remains.
The memory of the love they had for their daughters will never diminish either. I did not know how they felt then but, with a family of my own, I do now.
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Horror: Mothers await latest information from officials
I also know how the relatives of almost 300 priceless girls must be suffering.
I speak to a Nigerian civil rights activist who has mediated between Boko Haram and the authorities in the past.
Shehu Sani tells me he thinks the girls are alive. It is a notion based on years of studying the group and talking to them.
He has met these Boko Haram men and is trusted by them as an independent who is not afraid to speak his mind.
“They started out as a peaceful group,” he says. “But the violence they met from the Nigerian military made them take up arms.”
The kidnappings have horrified the international community – compounded by the chilling video released by Boko Haram’s leader, in which he laughed about selling the girls.
Mr Sani says: “That is code that the girls are alive.” He says the group is so ruthless that if the girls were killed, they would have been slaughtered on camera and the images uploaded on YouTube.The Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, is a man with a $7million bounty on his head so he trusts few outside his inner circle. But Mr Sani is well aware of his merciless nature.
The terror group, whose name means “Western education is sinful”, wants a strict, separate Islamic state in Nigeria’s Muslim north.
The girls were sitting their final exams and are now bargaining chips in a vicious war – Boko Haram may use them to seek release for some of their recruits in Nigerian jails.
The schoolgirls are pawns in the middle of this war. I, and every mother inside Nigeria and without, can identify with the pain and torment those young people must be feeling.
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