by Sam Childers
When I got home from that trip, I couldn’t think about anything else but the children over there and how hard their lives were. For years I’d put everything I had into making my construction business bigger and more profitable. I was proud of what I’d done, starting with nothing and now grossing a million dollars a year. I was constantly thinking about how to attract more business, make more money, squeeze more out of every minute. Africa changed all that. I couldn’t focus on my business. Didn’t even want to. I walked through the day in a trance, disconnected from everything around me, my head and heart brimming with thoughts of Yei—the people there, the destruction and death all around them. Innocence destroyed, hope shattered, the future dark and ominous.
I’d spent years collecting all the material things I thought I needed for living the good life. They’d always meant so much to me, and now they seemed selfish, extravagant, absolutely useless. I had an unbelievable gun collection in my house. Until Africa, looking at all those fine guns gave me joy. One day I walked by the gun cases, stopped in front of one of them, and started to cry. Why? I thought. Why do I have all this? There were children homeless and starving on the other side of the world, and I had guns that cost two thousand dollars apiece sitting in dustproof cases taking up space.
I started selling them. I started selling anything I could sell. I had an incredible bass boat with a portable phone and a TV, a fish finder, thousands of dollars’ worth of tackle. I couldn’t look at it. I couldn’t look at any of the frivolous toys I had anymore. It shamed me to have them when people were dying in Sudan because they didn’t have clean water or mosquito nets. I thought, I gotta do whatever I can to help these people.
Three months after I got back from Africa, I was over there again. The pastor I traveled with before was still there working on his chaplain school in Yei. He thought I had come back to help him some more with the buildings, but I said, “Buddy, God sent me here to help the children.” I explained to him what I felt I should do, but it turned out he didn’t want anything to do with a project if he wasn’t in charge. Although I’d helped him with his vision, he didn’t want to help me with mine. I was disappointed to see that attitude in a man of God whom I considered to be a friend.
I wasn’t sure whether to keep working with him or not, until he and I were eating one day at his project site and a beautiful Sudanese woman served us some rice. He took a bite, paused, then made a face. Suddenly he popped up from the table and stood face-to-face with our astonished server.
“This rice is no good!” he shouted. It wasn’t cooked to suit him. He slapped her across the face! Humiliated, she left the room and he sat back down to finish eating. Somehow I miraculously kept myself from boiling over.
That night I went to his room and said, “I want to tell you something right now. We’re friends. I love you, I respect you. But if you ever hit another person in front of me that can not fight back I’m going to tear you apart.” We both knew I meant every word.
The next morning I left the chaplain school campus and haven’t been back since.
I was heartsick at the thought that I had such a passion for Africa and was now at a complete dead end. A day or two later, on the way to the airport, I said, “God, I guess this means I can’t come back to Africa again.”
But God answered, No, this means I’m taking you to a new land in Africa to serve me. I’d have to develop my own contacts and resources in Africa from scratch. In the middle of a war zone.
Land mines. Roadblocks. Civil war. What exactly was going on in Sudan and Uganda? That whole story would take a book of its own. But in order to fully understand the scope of the miracle that’s taken place with our children’s ministry, you need to know a little bit about the big picture.
Sudan, in the northeastern part of Africa, is the biggest country on the continent, three and a half times the size of Texas. It used to be part of Egypt, which used to be part of the British Empire. In 1955 a civil war started; in 1956 Sudan became an independent republic; and less than three years later, the commander-in-chief of the Sudanese army took control of the country, outlawed political parties, and tried to bring all of Sudan under Islamic religious law and the Arabic language.
The north, where most of the people and power were, was heavily Islamic and Arabic, but in the south all the education had been provided for generations by Christian missionaries. People in the south were overwhelmingly non-Arabic and non-Muslim. While many of them were Christians, many others just wanted the freedom to worship and live as they pleased. The northern government, headquartered in the capital city of Khartoum, said that if you were Sudanese, you were an Islamic Arab. End of discussion.
Finally in 1972 the conflict ended with the Addis Ababa Agreement and a promise of autonomy for the south. An uneasy peace held until a new hard-line Muslim group took power in 1983 and basically nullified the Addis Ababa Agreement, reclaiming control over Southern Sudan. That’s when Colonel John Garang revolted against the northern government and formed the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army.
In 1989 Lieutenant General Omar al-Bashir seized power. His Revolutionary Command Council imprisoned political opponents, outlawed political parties and trade unions, and zeroed in on crushing resistance to Islam in the south. Over the next decade the country came unglued bit by bit. The civil war caused food shortage and unimaginable suffering for the people in the countryside. When the RCC realized they would never defeat the SPLA, they turned loose a radical Muslim militia called the mujahedeen. People were murdered by the thousands, many more displaced, and the government refused to let humanitarian agencies in with food and medicine.
As bad as all that was, it wasn’t the worst thing the Southern Sudanese people had to deal with. In my opinion the worst menace to the people there is a wild dog named Joseph Kony, who heads a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army. These are the maniacs who have devastated Southern Sudan and neighboring Uganda, which is where the LRA originally started and has its base of operations. The fighting goes on along both sides of the border.
Like Sudan in 1956, Uganda gained its independence from the British Empire six years later, then fell apart due to tribal warfare and a poor economy. Southern Uganda had most of the nation’s people and wealth. It’s where the capital city, Kampala—the center of most of the tourist trade—is located. The northern Ugandans, including many members of the Acholi tribe, felt neglected and shut out by the government of Yoweri Museveni. Like the majority of Ugandans, Museveni is a Christian, though he did come to power in a military coup. (And while the Uganda–Sudan border is a lawless place, Uganda has a much more successful and responsible government than Sudan.)
Joseph Kony formed the LRA from what was left of a rebel group first set up by Alice Lakwena to demand rights for the Acholi people. Some versions of the story say Alice claimed to be demon possessed. In 1987, about a year after she got the resistance movement going, Kony took it over. Since then, the objectives of the LRA have gotten blurred, and these days nobody really knows what Kony and the LRA are fighting for. They don’t seem to have any goal or objective other than terrifying people and practicing their gut-wrenching brand of mutilation and disfigurement.
Joseph Kony didn’t have much money to pay and maintain his army, so around 1994, about the same time he moved the LRA base of operations from Uganda to Sudan, he started kidnapping children and turning them into soldiers. They’re weak, compliant, easy to train, and easy to brainwash. And most soldiers on the other side are going to hesitate before shooting at a child, giving the child a chance to shoot first. In time more than thirty thousand kidnap victims became child soldiers. In 2002 Kony moved his headquarters back to Uganda.
Joseph Kony cultivates a personal mystique. For years every image of him showed him in a fatigue uniform with long beaded dreadlocks and big mirrored sunglasses. He thinks he’s on some holy mission. But I’m here to tell you that if anybody on this earth is more evil than Kony, I’ve never heard of him.
Kony and his men raid villages looking for children to capture. They shock and traumatize the kids as soon as possible to frighten them into doing anything they’re told. They sometimes kill their parents in front of them, hacking them to death with machetes or burning them alive. They slice babies out of their mothers’ bellies and set them on fire. They make the mother watch before raping and killing her. They cut off noses, breasts, ears, lips, or hands, sometimes forcing children to eat the cut-off pieces.
An LRA victim in her sixties. This woman’s lips and ears were cut off.
They hand an eleven-year-old boy a machete and order him to disembowel his mother. He does it.
They run off with children from teenagers to toddlers who will become armed soldiers trained to kill children like themselves, to shoot girls on their way to the well or the river for drinking water, to murder parents on command. The soldiers may kill and cut up one or two of their young captives or nail them alive to a tree, as a warning to the others. The ones remaining quickly learn to kill without feeling or remorse. Even some of the youngest will soon carry machine guns almost as big as they are. Others become pack animals, carrying ammunition and supplies for troops on the march. Some become cooks or orderlies. Many, if not most of them, serve as sex slaves. Senior officers get their pick of the older girls; lower ranks get the younger ones; everybody else gets the boys.
The Uganda People’s Defence Force gives children and their families in the area some protection, but no one outside the cities in northern Uganda or Southern Sudan feels safe at night. Many of the children have been orphaned by AIDS. Others have had parents killed in the fighting. Even boys and girls who still have their families are targets for LRA raids. Villagers are powerless against the guns and the mindless intensity of the rebels. Many of these fighters were themselves kidnapped as children and remember nothing but a lifetime of killing on Kony’s orders. They don’t know why they kill; they only know that if they don’t, they’ll have their own lips chopped off or be decapitated as a lesson to their fellow soldiers.
Because the nights bring the threat of invasion and terror to the villages, thousands of children in northern Uganda have become night commuters, leaving the nightmare of capture behind for the safety of the city. Every afternoon after school they walk—some with bedrolls balanced on their heads and many more with no belongings at all—to the nearest town where they jam into schools, churches, hospitals, anywhere with room on the floor to sleep. Those who have food or money to buy something share with those who don’t, though plenty of them will still go to sleep without anything in their stomachs. They trade hunger for a long walk and a night spent on a cold floor. It’s the only way they can be sure to be safe from Kony’s raids in the countryside.
The heat of the day gives way to the evening breeze as the children come into town. You hear them first, shouting at friends and calling out to their brothers and sisters to stay together. Then you see them, a swirling tangle of brightly colored clothes bobbing through the darkening streets. Some are dressed in little more than rags, but they’re bright against the scarred, once-painted wooden doors that open to admit them to a hospital courtyard or schoolroom.
Children being children everywhere, the air is full of laughter, and playmates dart after each other until the room gets too full to run. Wide smiles and sparkling eyes show little hint of fear. They’re safe for another night. As routine as it is, every evening is an adventure and every night is fun. There are no adults present, no chaperones or monitors. The children take care of each other.
One small but confident voice starts to sing, clear and silvery in the night. In English with a lilting African accent:
Never stand away from God,
Never stand away—Hallelujah!
Never stand away from God,
Never stand away.
Other voices immediately join in—everybody knows the song—and the rich African harmony adapted over the years to the simple Western tune fills the room. There’s a leader and a chorus, batting the lyrics back and forth and bouncing them off the walls. The beat is energetic, full of life. Little hands start clapping, some on the downbeat and others on the beat in between. The room grows dark—there’s no electricity—and the song goes on into the night. Finally the children settle down to sleep. At first light the next morning, some of them gather their meager bedrolls and start the long walk home to their villages. Others just stay in town, spending the day on the street and scavenging for food, until twilight and the next night’s sleep.
When I came back to Africa, I believed the best way I could help the people there, especially the children, was to bring medicine and medical help into places that didn’t have any. The governments of Sudan and Uganda weren’t assisting these people. CARE and the Red Cross and those kinds of organizations stayed away because they said it was too dangerous. That left nobody. Correction: that left me and God and the great big Land Cruiser I bought with a paper sack full of cash.
I’d been driving the mobile clinic back and forth to Africa for about a year when I found my land outside Nimule, where refugees from LRA attacks were trying to set up their own sort of refugee camp a few miles outside of town. That was when God told me to buy that land and start a center for children there. And so I finished up my mobile clinic operation and started working on the orphanage.
Being in the construction business, I started looking for ways to improve on the design of the tukuls that my soldier friend Ben and I were building with the help of some local men. One thing I did was dig the floors down below ground level. When you stepped inside you stepped down sixteen inches. That way if you were asleep at night and somebody started shooting, you’d be lying below the line of fire. Instead of plain mud brick, I started making my tukuls out of fired brick and cement, with walls three bricks thick to stop a rifle bullet. Later I replaced the thatched roofs with metal, so that we had basically a brick hut with a metal roof in the shape of a native tukul.
One of the best security improvements we made on the property was a chain-link fence. The first fence we had was made of bamboo, the poles jammed right next to each other in a solid wall. This is usually the best kind of fence you can build in the bush, and it’s a good, strong fence. The problem is that you can’t see through it, so LRA soldiers could come from the riverbank right up to the fence undetected and poke a rif le barrel through it or over the top. One time the LRA killed a person on the compound next to us and tried to raid ours. I was back in Pennsylvania that night and got a phone call from one of our soldiers with the news. I said, “I’ll be there in three days.”
I was ready to give the LRA a lesson they’d never forget. We sat at night waiting for rebels to sneak up toward us. If you saw anybody coming in the moonlight, you didn’t call out a name or say anything; you just shot on sight. I sat outside with my AK in my lap, waiting for them to come back . . . but they didn’t. My guess is they knew I was there, and they weren’t going to shoot at somebody they knew would shoot back. To this day our compound has never been raided, and no enemy has ever set foot inside.
Cornerstone Television of Pittsburgh started doing documentary segments about our ministry. They recognized the need for better protection and gave us thirty-nine thousand dollars for a new fence. During the day we tore down the bamboo fence and had soldiers slash all the underbrush between our compound and the river so no one could use it for cover. We put up a six-foot chain-link fence with two feet of barbed wire on top all the way around, then added four more strings of barbed wire a foot or so off the ground, eight feet from the fence on the outside. The fence had steel poles I designed, with two wheelbarrows full of cement anchoring each pole. At times when the LRA presence was really bad, we had two RPG launchers inside the fence and a PK .30 caliber machine gun in a bunker at each corner. Now that the situation is relatively quiet, ten soldiers still patrol the compound around the clock, but the big hardware is gone. It would take a pretty powerful army to bust through there.
In my travels a
round Uganda and Sudan, I’ve been attacked more times than I can count. Sometimes it’s when I’m on the offensive, and sometimes it’s completely unexpected. Either way I say, “Come on, LRA. I’m ready for you!” They may get me one day, but until then, every time I meet them, my goal is to make their army a little smaller. There’s always a chance they can take me out, but if that day ever comes, you can be sure a sizable crowd of them will be going with me.
FIVE
money, missions, and mercenaries
The only thing I fight more often than the LRA is the endless battle for funding. From the beginning, our ministry in Africa has run on a shoestring. But we still have to have money for the shoestring. Compared to the costs in the U.S., most of the things we need—basic food, fuel, clothing, medical supplies, staff salaries—are a fraction of what they are at home. Sometimes, though, scraping together even that fraction seems impossible, no matter how hard we scrimp and budget. The number of children we can save depends on the amount of money we have to work with. If we can’t feed a child or give him a bed at night, that’s one child facing capture, starvation, and death—one child we can’t rescue.
Especially in the early days, we had absolutely no money. We had to improvise, do without, and get very creative to keep things running. Time and again I said, “God, we need money to do this work. You know this better than I do. You know how stressed and stretched we are. You know I have a heart for this ministry and will use my resources responsibly. So help us out here!” But God wouldn’t play by my rules. He demanded faith first, then gave our ministry his blessing. He had to see how far I was willing to sacrifice before deciding I was worthy to handle the job.