Three weeks ago, in the hours after the predawn raid, skeletal reports said that 100 girls had been abducted from their school.

The number quickly rose to 234 girls missing in Chibok, Nigeria. Soon it was 270.

Earlier this week, The New York Times reported that more than 300 girls were missing, dragged from their schools and forced into pickups that whisked them off into the forest.

Eleven more were kidnapped Monday.

Their captors are members of Boko Haram, an Islamic terrorist group whose name means "Western education is sinful." Boko Haram has murdered many innocent Nigerians in the past four years.

These girls are in imminent danger.

"I abducted your girls," Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau said in a video released earlier this week. He called them "slaves" and vowed, "By Allah, I will sell them in the marketplace."

I hope that by now, you know about these girls.

Most of the mainstream media here in the U.S. were slow to report on their plight. Nigerian activists on social media took care of that, particularly on Twitter with the hashtag "BringOurGirlsBack."

Now every major news organization is posting and publishing regular updates. On Tuesday, President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry announced that a U.S. team would help with efforts to rescue these girls.

I'm not going to devote another inch of this column to complaining about how long it took us to report this story with the depth and breadth it deserves. That would help no one now.

I also don't want to speculate about the girls' fate. Like most people with an opinion about this unfolding tragedy, I am not on the ground reporting in Nigeria. Nor am I one of those mothers screaming for someone, anyone, to bring their babies home.

Instead, I want to tell you about Afi Scruggs, a digital journalist and former newspaper columnist who decided she couldn't take one more minute of doing nothing.

A little background first: Afi, who is black, enrolled in the University of Chicago in 1974 at the age of 16. Soon after she started, she began wrapping her hair in a gele, which is a traditional headdress for Nigerian women. She wore a gele at Brown University, too, where she got her master's and doctorate degrees, and later at The Plain Dealer in Cleveland, which is where I met her.

On May 3, just past midnight, Afi gave up on sleep and crawled out of bed. She couldn't stop thinking about those missing girls, and she was tired of reading complaints on social media about how Americans didn't care.

She had already been posting links to coverage on All Digitocracy's website, but she wanted to do more.

So Afi reached for a long piece of fabric painted by a friend in Nigeria and decided to make a three-minute video to share with the world.

She posted it to YouTube, Facebook and All Digitocracy's site, with this introduction:

"On May 3, women across America will don geles or head ties to support efforts to find the abducted Nigerian school girls. I made this short video on how to tie a simple gele. Please share the video. More importantly, wear your gele until we get those girls back home."

She disabled comments on YouTube. "I know I don't need to tell you why," she said. It gets ugly there.

Afi said she wants every woman, regardless of race or ethnicity, to feel comfortable wearing a gele, but she understands not everybody is comfortable with that.

She does, however, hope to raise awareness with hers. She's changed her Facebook profile to a photo of her wearing her gele, and she used the same picture to make a name tag.

"I Stand With The Girls of Chibok," the name tag reads, along with the hashtag "BringOurGirlsHome."

"I want people to ask about it so that I can tell them about the girls."

She said she's going to wear the name tag until they all come home.

"How long do you think that might be?" I asked.

She sighed. "I'll probably be wearing it until I'm 75."

Connie Schultz is a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist and an essayist for Parade magazine. She is the author of two books, including "...and His Lovely Wife," which chronicled the successful race of her husband, Sherrod Brown, for the U.S. Senate. To find out more about Connie Schultz ([email protected]) and read her past columns, please visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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