by Sam Childers
I switch back and forth between being a husband, father, and minister in America and a soldier and commander living by the gun in Africa. Strange as it sounds, after I’ve been in the U.S. for a while I start longing for Africa; I feel that African part of me straining to come out. Three months at home and I start missing Deng and Guk and Nineteen and Slinky. Start thinking about another rescue.
It’s so hard to tell people at home what life is like in Uganda and Sudan. They have no point of reference to understand how desperate the people are, how much they need, and how far even the smallest donation will stretch. I get in the pulpit to preach, and cry out of my own emotion and memories, but also out of frustration and confusion. I can’t really explain what it’s like to be in Sudan leading a rescue with an AK in my hands and a pistol on each hip, and standing in a pulpit in Central City two days later.
People in the church talk about being “soldiers of Christ.” While the phrase can have several different meanings, in my case I take it literally. But I don’t believe I’m doing any more than Jesus would do if he were here. If he knew children were being kidnapped and tortured, do you think he would just walk by? The Good Samaritan lay on the road robbed and wounded while a priest and a Levite walked right by. Would Jesus walk to the other side of the road or would he go help that person? Jesus would do the same thing most of us would do.
Some still say, “I don’t believe Jesus would go fight.” I agree. He probably wouldn’t. He probably wouldn’t have to. He could turn water into wine. He’d handle it some other way.
I’m no theologian, but I know what I know. The fighting we’ve done in Uganda and Sudan has produced an oasis of peace and safety in a very dangerous part of the world. If you were to visit there today you could see it for yourself.
A day at the Shekinah Fellowship Children’s Center starts right when the sun begins to come up. That’s when the ladies of the compound start arriving. Sixteen women do the cooking and washing and take care of the children. They are the hardest-working people I know in Sudan. They work from sunup till sundown at the compound and still take care of their own families.
The first chore of the morning is to boil water for breakfast. The cooks fix tea and porridge, which is oatmeal with a consistency like grits that they drink straight out of the bowl. The ladies add sugar to it. Though the average child in Sudan only eats once a day, this is the first of three daily meals we feed our kids. The workers themselves have tea and bread.
While the ladies are getting breakfast on, the children start to come out of their dormitories to wash up. Everybody in Sudan loves taking care of their teeth. I don’t know why, but you never have to tell a child there to go brush his teeth. They’re excited about it. After they wash up they have their breakfast, then the older ones leave for school in town.
We pay school fees for the older kids and buy their uniforms, of which they’re always proud. Many of them have never belonged to anything; having a uniform is exciting because it shows they’re students in a school where they fit in and belong. After school they come back for a late lunch and have playtime. Right before dark, shortly before bedtime, they eat again. The basic diet for lunch and dinner is beans and maize bread, which is a flatbread made from white cornmeal. Sometimes we have rice, and twice a week we have meat and fish. We also serve a vegetable twice a week—usually cabbage but sometimes greens.
Sometimes visitors to the compound want to know why we don’t feed the children meat and vegetables every day. The reason is that it’s expensive and logistically almost impossible. As I mentioned earlier, besides feeding the children and the workers, we feed anyone in the neighborhood who comes at mealtime, which adds up to about fifteen hundred meals a day. You butcher a cow in the morning, and it’s all gone by bedtime. There’s no refrigeration, and transportation is expensive, so we have to depend on what we can get locally in large quantities. The beans and maize bread are some of the most nourishing food you can get. Besides, it’s actually pretty tasty.
Our youngest children sleep on grass mats on the floor until they stop wetting the bed. As soon as they’re old enough, they get a bed. The smallest ones sleep two or three to a bed, while the bigger ones have a bed to themselves. The average Sudanese child sleeps on the bare floor of a tukul. Our children all have sheets, towels, blankets, and mosquito nets. There’s so much more that we need, but our children are double and triple blessed over anyone else in our area.
The youngest children are toddlers, and the oldest are teenagers. Three of them, James, Francis, and John, were child soldiers, all taught to kill with clubs, machetes, and guns. James, who is eleven years old, killed more than thirty people during his military career. Francis told me that Joseph Kony and his men set up an ambush to kill me on the road, and that Kony was upset when nobody could kill me. That was the time we drove through a group of LRA who looked down and never raised their weapons. Francis said nobody had the power to lift a gun. I never knew about the ambush until he told me.
We have a Sudanese nurse who works at our clinic every day, taking care of the inevitable cuts and bruises as well as sickness, scorpion bites, and whatever else turns up. We also have a woman who teaches the girls when they start to become young ladies, helping them in certain things that the men (our nurse is a man) cannot teach.
That clinic today isn’t far from the tree where I hung my mosquito net the first night I spent on the children’s center property. I always show it to visitors because it’s so hard to imagine Ben and me clearing a path to it and clearing a spot in the grass to stretch out. The cleared spot of ground now stretches hundreds of yards in every direction, even beyond the compound fence. Inside the compound, the roads are smooth and safe—not a boulder in sight—made of packed dirt lined in some places with bricks. Rows of trees grow along the perimeter, and hedges and blooming shrubs spring up around some of the buildings.
Those early tukuls have been rebuilt out of fired bricks and tin. Some of the older children live in them now. We have dormitories and are scrounging for funds to build new ones all the time. Each one-story dorm costs about twenty-two thousand dollars. The sturdy, fired-brick buildings are inviting, with stucco on the front painted ochre; doors, window shutters, and trim are a contrasting cheerful blue that resists fading, even in the merciless African sun. Cool, welcoming porches all along the front have concrete floors and metal poles to support the tin roofs overhead. Inside, the furniture is plain but serviceable and the rooms dark and comparatively cool in the daytime heat. Along each wall there are bunk beds stacked two or three high, each with its own mosquito net.
The dining halls are designed a lot like the dorms, including paint colors, and they are furnished with rows of long trestle tables and benches where the children eat their meals. Our simple kitchens use the local style of wood-burning oven. It’s low tech, the simplest and most reliable way to prepare our meals. The cooks do a lot of their work outside because it’s so hot. Many of the ladies who work for us are widows whose husbands have been killed by the LRA. All together we have a staff of about forty-five, including the cooks, teachers, caretakers, security staff, medical staff, and administrators. We are also building a library and have been working on a church building for a long time. We’ve met in the church’s unfinished shell for months because every time we get going on it, something else comes up that we feel like we need to finish first.
Sam Childers enjoys an average evening, sitting on the porch with the children in Sudan.
Outside the gate it’s only fifty yards or so to the river, where there always seems to be a crowd of women washing clothes and bathing their children. Chattering nonstop, their musical voices blend with the sound of water flowing by.
Our soccer team is actually the best in the whole area. They’re almost undefeated. Sometimes I wonder if that’s because these orphans know they have nothing besides what they’re playing for, so they try their very best and leave nothing on the field. There’s a full-size soccer field and a playground�
�the first playground in Southern Sudan—with sturdy, first-class equipment anchored in concrete. Swings, slides, seesaws, and a merry-go-round swarm with clusters of the youngest children during the day, while the older ones are away at school. They return in the afternoon to do their lessons, practice soccer in their flashy green and white uniforms, or enjoy a little free time of their own.
In 2002 we started securing and guarding the compound.
There are always ten guards on duty, which is an improvement because we used to need twenty. We were able to cut back because fighting in our area isn’t as bad as it used to be; the government now keeps a platoon of soldiers outside our fence within a hundred yards of our gate. We used to have machine guns posted at the fence, but those are now unnecessary. Four guards patrol and man the gate during the day, and six walk the perimeter at night; all ten live with us on the compound.
When there’s no LRA activity, the nights are peaceful and relatively cool. The only electricity we have is what we generate ourselves; in order to save money we run our generator no more than three hours or so per day. From dusk on we have electricity for a while, but we try to rely on fires and flashlights until the adults go to bed. I sit around with the soldiers for a while and listen for any signs of enemy activity. The African night is so vast it still impresses me. When I’m sitting around the fire with the troops, it’s easy to look up at the sky and remember spending my first night in this place. Then I look around and see all the dormitories, roads, warehouses, and everything else we’ve built in the past ten years and can hardly get my head around what a miracle it all is.
The African night sleeps. The singing and laughing and giggling in the dormitories have wound down. Three hundred young souls—bellies filled, teeth brushed—snuggle down under warm blankets on soft, clean sheets for a safe night’s rest. For some, old terrors come back as nightmares, shocking them awake with a gasp or a scream. They are too young to have gone through what they have, too young to have lived such dark days with horrific memories burned into their minds. A comforting hand reaches out. A bunkmate calls out quietly, “It’s only a dream. Tom-Tom can never get you here. The soldiers are with us. God is with us. You are safe.”
The big, open, cooking fireplaces glow in the darkness, coals banked, at rest after a busy day. The skilled hands of the cooks that command them rest nearby, fifteen hundred meals behind them today and another fifteen hundred ahead of them after the next sunrise. Widows of war—victims themselves—these women find purpose and fulfillment in their task.
And so here sleeps my life’s work. A little oasis of safety and assurance in a sea of war and danger. A light for Christ in a murky and troubled land. A calm and fearless outpost of hope in the middle of another man’s war.
EIGHT
the call
In under three years, Clyde had taken me from a wasted drug abuser to a partner in a successful business. He taught me how to do the work better and more efficiently, how to manage a job, how to do an estimate—everything I needed to run the show on my own. I had come a long way and was making more money than ever, but my life still wasn’t right. I was still spending lots of time in bars, still fighting, still selling drugs and doing half an ounce or an ounce of cocaine every day myself. I knew I had to get out of Florida for the same reason I’d left Minnesota years before: either I was going to kill myself with drugs or somebody was going to kill me in a fight.
When Clyde died in 1985 I actually inherited his business; but instead of staying to run it, I got somebody else to come in and manage it for Clyde’s widow. That ended up being a big mistake. The new manager stole from her and was sued. Instead of bringing Clyde’s old gear to Pennsylvania, I sold it—along with what I already had of my own—and went to Central City with brand-new tools and equipment. Lynn and I sold our furniture and everything else we had and moved to Central City that summer.
When I started setting up my business and looking for work, my headquarters was a little eight-by-eight shed beside my parents’ garage. I kept a hot tar kettle for roofing and my other tools there. When winter came, I realized there wasn’t going to be any work during the cold weather in Pennsylvania, so I went back to Florida to do roofing and outside construction for the season. When I returned north in the spring of 1986, I brought a pound and a half of marijuana with me. I sold a lot of it in those days. Sometimes I brought it home myself, and sometimes my friend Delane boxed it up—packed with coffee to hide the smell—and sent it to me via UPS. By repackaging pounds of it into dime bags—ten dollars’ worth that would make eight or ten joints—I was making a pile of money.
Around that time I had a change of heart about doing hard drugs. Clyde had showed me I could be better tomorrow than I was yesterday, and I decided that part of being better was to get off hard drugs. I still smoked a lot of weed and still loved to fight, but I pretty much got off of cocaine and other really dangerous narcotics.
I had come to a turning point in my life; I wanted something more.
I didn’t go through any sort of program or see a doctor or counselor, though I think that way works for a lot of people and it’s what they need to do. There are certain drugs, like heroin, that can cause extreme withdrawal symptoms, but for me, getting off cocaine and the other stuff I was doing was a matter of mental strength. It was like an overeater wanting a cream-filled donut. He doesn’t want one or two; he wants six, and knows he can’t eat one or else he’ll end up with six. I had to say in my mind that I was not going to do any hard drugs at all anymore. That’s how I stopped. I didn’t know about God’s sovereignty then or how the Bible talks about us controlling our bodies. Ultimately God is in control, but he puts each of us in charge of what we think and what our bodies do. At the time, I believed that I was in complete control of my body and that I could choose to say no to drugs. For me, it was a matter of willpower.
Before long, Childers Roofing and Painting was going great guns. I took on concrete work and started putting up pole buildings as well; later I went into excavating. I hired more workers and bought more equipment. Eventually I expanded to where I owned two bulldozers, two dump trucks, a backhoe, a crane, and a lot of other gear. I hired one man just to keep it all running and another just to help me drive. Clyde’s business lessons were putting food on our table, and that gave me a burst of confidence in my own abilities.
I started running a pawnshop out of my company office. The pawnshop was so successful, I branched out into real estate by buying a couple of old company houses in coal mining towns. I soon found that I could snap up houses for as little as three thousand dollars. Granted, these houses needed a lot of work, but I had my own construction crew, so I was able to fix them up and sell them at a profit. My dad went in with me on some of these.
Then I started buying all the old houses I could, fixing them up, and financing them back to the sellers for a thousand dollars down. They had a like-new house for a monthly payment lower than rent, and I had a steady investment income that didn’t require me to lift a finger. I owned about twenty of these when I stopped doing it after a few years; it was too much hassle. I had been doing a lot of the work myself, but the company was getting so big I was sending workers down to do what I should have been doing. I started fading out of the real estate business, but I made some good money while I was at it.
This isn’t to say everything about my life was rosy. I was still drinking and smoking pot, same as I’d been doing forever, and I still fought a lot—not because I got into rough situations or because I was defending an underdog, but because I liked fighting. Lynn had become a Christian in the fall of 1987 and, as I’ve already said, I was jealous of God for the time he spent with her when she and I could have been fishing or shopping for antiques. We argued about it sometimes. I never hurt her physically, but I had a nasty temper and let her know exactly how I felt.
About that time, God decided what he wanted to change next about me and how to get my attention in order to do it. Lynn wanted us to have a baby but w
e couldn’t seem to get pregnant. We both thought it would be wonderful if Wayne could have a little brother or sister. That wasn’t the way it turned out though. It looked like maybe there was something wrong, and we wouldn’t be able to conceive a child the old-fashioned way, so we decided to try in vitro fertilization. To have the best chance of success I had to quit all drugs, quit drinking, and even quit smoking cigarettes. I wanted a baby, too, and figured it was worth it if that would do the trick.
As time passed without a pregnancy, Lynn got sadder and more frustrated. Some of her God stuff had started to affect me a little, and I started praying at night that he would bring us a child. One night, lying upstairs in my bedroom, I made a deal. I said, “Lord, if you allow my wife to get pregnant and you allow us to have a child, I will never do drugs or drink again.” Not too long after that came the fantastic day when the doctor said my wife was pregnant. My prayer was answered, and I kept my end of the bargain. Since that day I haven’t had so much as a beer. On May 15, 1989, our daughter, Paige, was born.
Three years later, in the summer of 1992, I gave my heart to the Lord during a revival at the Assembly of God church on the same night the pastor prophesied I would go with him to Africa. While I thought the whole Africa thing was crazy then, I did feel in my heart that the time had come for me to be a pastor. He was calling me in the same little town where I had first felt the tug of the ministry during my great-grandmother’s funeral so many years ago.
Since that long-ago day, I had turned away from that calling more times than I could count. Yet I had felt it fleetingly, even during those wild and lost years. It happened once when I was running from some Indians on a Minnesota reservation. I ran off the highway and into the woods to try and lose my pursuers. I had my duffel bag with me, and I groped frantically inside the bag for the sawed-off 12-gauge I knew was there—somewhere. Pounding through the underbrush and trying to watch where I was going, I was fishing around in my bag for my gun, yanking out clothes and tossing them aside, when my hand hit an old Bible my mom had given me.