Ibadan, Nigeria ? Allegedly abandoned by their American mother in Africa, seven children from Texas begged small change to buy food and shuttled from a neglectful stranger’s care to a concrete-block orphanage, Nigerians said Thursday.

Eventually, the children proved their American citizenship to a passing missionary from Texas by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner.” He notified U.S. authorities, who got the youngsters home last week as Texas welfare officials investigated the mother.

Ages 8 to 16, the three boys and four girls, all of whom had been adopted by the woman, apparently spent 10 months in this market city of millions bustling with traders and crippled and leprous beggars.

Sick and hungry

A Nigerian welfare official said local authorities first learned about the children only a few weeks ago, and immediately took them into custody and turned them over to the government orphanage.

By then, 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 who gave his name as Alex and is a former ward of the orphanage now living there as a student. “They looked tired. They’d been sick for long, without food.”

U.S. authorities believe the seven American children arrived in Nigeria last October with their mother, whose fiance has a relative here. The mother, Mercury Liggins, 47, left within weeks. She later took a job as a food-service worker in U.S. military mess halls in Iraq, but quit in July, U.S. officials said. She is believed to be back in Houston, but couldn’t be located for comment.

Government workers and others who knew the children said she left them in the care of a businessman, Obiora Nwankwo, who has a well-tended, two-story house in an affluent neighborhood of Ibadan. The nature of the relationship between Liggins and Nwankwo wasn’t known. Nwankwo couldn’t be found when an AP reporter visited the home.

Boarding school

Nwankwo drove up to the gates of an Ibadan Montessori School on Oct. 16, school officials said. He enrolled the children in classes with what officials here said was benefit money from the children’s mother.

Unidentified Nigerian orphans do chores at the state-run orphanage in Ibadan, Nigeria. Seven Texas children, suffering from disease and malnutrition, were discovered in late July in Ibadan, Nigeria, by a visiting Texas missionary. The missionary's San Antonio pastor notified House Majority Leader Tom DeLay of Texas. The children were returned to Texas last week.

“He claimed he was their guardian,” principal Johnson Akintayo said. “They were put up in the boarding school.”

Their new school was clean, fronted by a row of tall palm trees, and the children seemed happy at first.

But when the children returned from Nwankwo’s home 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.

The children began begging classmates and staff for money, using it to buy food.

Then Nwankwo began missing payments to the school, and he complained that staff were being too nosey about the children, Akintayo said.

By July 22, all seven children had stopped attending.

Orphanage

Six days later, Ibadan’s Association of Women Lawyers alerted local immigration authorities about the children, a social welfare official said, and Nwankwo’s home was raided the same day.

Nigerian officials did not notify the U.S. Embassy, the official added, saying that was because the case was a sensitive matter diplomatically.

At the orphanage, the seven passed their time playing board games or cadging a staff member’s mobile phone to play the games on it.

Their extraordinary ordeal ended only with the chance visit of an American missionary to the orphanage on Aug. 5.

Swarmed by children claiming to be from Texas, too, missionary Warren Beemer 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.

Ultimately, Beemer launched into the American national anthem. Placing their hands on their hearts, the children joined in — singing out “The Star-Spangled Banner” on the grass-and-dirt yard of the orphanage.

Convinced, Beemer contacted officials in the United States, and the children were returned home last Friday and put in the care of two foster families in Houston.

Alex, the student, said he exchanged e-mail addresses with two of the children, 16-year-old Brandy and 12-year-old Alice, as U.S. Embassy staffers ushered them out of the orphanage.

“They were very happy,” he said. “But they were even crying when they were leaving, because we had got so used to each other.”