Heroic: Abducted Nigerian girls return to school.

They were attacked for trying to learn. But that won’t stop these teenagers from achieving their dream of an education. After all, it’s the one thing nobody can take away from you.

In April last year, 219 girls were stolen from their schoolhouse in the middle of the night by armed men.

The teenage girls were targeted by a group called Boko Haram — which means “Western education is forbidden” — simply because they attended school.

Those Nigerian girls were packed into lorries as the buildings around them burned to the ground. They were spirited away into the deep, dark forest crawling with radical Islamic militants, and some were reportedly “married off” to grown men for around $12.

Related content: “$12. That’s how much it takes to make a schoolgirl your sex slave.”

It’s an awful story, and one that Mamamia reported on extensively last year. But today, we can finally report some good news.

Because 57 of girls escaped Boko Haram’s clutches — and now, some are bravely returning to school in defiance of the extremist group’s threats.

As the Guardian reports, two sisters who escaped on the night of the abduction are now back at school after a stranger turned up at their family home offering a scholarship to study in a neighbouring state.

The sisters, Asabe and Ruth, held hands and jumped from the open lorries onto which they’d been packed my Boko Haram militants during the abduction raid.

Now, even though Boko Haram has repeatedly warned students they’ll kill the families of those who continued schooling, those two brave girls have accepted the offer — and they’re back at school.

Related content: the 5 biggest wins for women’s rights in 2014.

In another beautiful twist, the stranger who offered them the scholarship is a 27-year-old woman called Godiya whose own sister was abducted by the militants.

In memory of her stolen sister,Godiy has been travelling on a motorbike pillion across the state, trying to persuade a family in each district to accept a scholarship for their daughter, the Guardian reports.

Sickening: Three young girls used as suicide bombers, reportedly by Boko Haram.

Godiya works at the American University of Nigeria herself, and persuaded her boss Margee Ensign to set up the one-year scholarship fund.

She told the Guardian she was well aware of the risk she was taking by persuading local girls to pursue their education — but was determined to do something to help the traumatised local girls.

“I don’t talk much about it, because if these people come back, I will be one of their first targets for helping girls to come back to school,” she said. “(But) I had to take the risk. Whatever happens to me, I can say I tried.”