by Sam Childers
Most of the cattle raiders are from the Toposa tribe. They are some of the meanest people I’ve ever met. These are the Africans you may have seen pictures of that are into body stretching with wooden discs in their lips. In some areas only the women have the discs, and in others men and women both have them. Mothers will make a little hole at the base of a baby’s lower lip with a thorn, and enlarge it over time into a hole big enough to put a little wooden plug in. After that, the plugs are replaced with gradually larger ones until finally they can be bigger around than the woman’s head. In some tribes a woman’s dowry is based on the size of her lip disc. An inexpensive wife might cost ten cows, where one with the biggest lip ring might fetch seventy-five cows, a king’s ransom in Boma.
The women there also may have beautiful gold ankle cuffs, bracelets, and other jewelry. There’s lots of gold in Boma. So much, in fact, that the tribes there trade it for sugar. Yes, you can go to some places in the Boma region and buy gold with sacks of sugar. Even some of their weapons are gold. The men melt gold or steel into little bracelets an inch around that might weigh a pound or two. That way, when they get into a fight, they don’t have to make a fist. They just start swinging their arms and they’ve got these steel or gold weights around their arms or wrists to take care of business.
The women typically wear animal skins and are very beautiful except for having their lips and ears stretched out. The men are usually naked except for bandoleers draped across their chests and AK-47s in their hands.
The Boma Plateau is desert, yet somehow the people have managed to graze cattle for generations. It would be like living and raising cattle in the Nevada desert. The cows are hearty, bony animals with square silhouettes—not sleek at all, but rangy like a Texas longhorn. They have huge horns, however, that are pointed more upward than out to the side like a longhorn. For the raiders, a day’s work consists of nothing but robbing people. They will rob you, they will kill you, because that’s just what they do. They steal cattle from each other. Whole towns in the region are fenced in with trees of thorns for protection. In the desert certain types of acacia trees grow; they have no leaves but only thorns about as long as a finger and as sharp as a needle.
I was riding with four SPLA soldiers through a section of Boma thick with cattle raiders. In the rainy season, there’s so much rain that low places turn into riverbeds running through the desert. We’d been tearing along in this one bed and came up out of it onto an old road that’s barely traveled. There in front of us, fifteen or twenty armed raiders had the road blocked. Thomas was driving, f lying along fast, and slammed to a halt. All five of us were loaded. I had my AK on my lap as usual. As soon as we stopped, every one of the raiders rushed up and pointed their guns at us in the truck.
Something about the cattle raiders you learn when you’re there for a while is that they never have a lot of ammo. They hardly ever have a full clip in their guns. They’ll keep what little ammo they have in belts around them, but usually there are only five or six bullets in the gun. They weren’t expecting us to be soldiers; they thought we were just missionaries or some other typically easy, defenseless target. Once they saw what they had hold of, they started hollering back and forth to each other.
One of the soldiers sitting behind me was named Nineteen. He always carried pineapple grenades, which send fragments of metal flying everywhere when they blow. It was so bad that day that Nineteen grabbed a grenade off his belt and pulled out the pin. He was ready for action. (As long as you hold the handle down, a grenade won’t blow, even with the pin out. Pulling the pin is the first step. If you don’t release the handle you can reinsert the pin. Once you release, the jig’s up.)
I could hear these guys talking broken English and once again thought, I’m going to be the first one shot. I’m the only white guy here. I know everyone’s going to shoot me. I’ve got to shoot this guy in my window. I’ve got to shoot this guy! Something inside me kept saying, Take him now! Take him now! As the bandits argued, my gun sat out of sight on my lap pointing out the window. I raised my leg nearest the door so I would hit the guy about in the chest or below the chin. I pulled the safety off. I could understand what they were saying. They were speaking different languages, but it all went back to Arabic: “No, let them shoot first. Let them shoot.”
My soldiers were trying to talk to them at the same time. I felt it was time to make a move. I started to squeeze the trigger. I was going to shoot this raider right in the throat before somebody shot me. It felt like the longest trigger pull in history. My AK didn’t fire and didn’t fire, and then I heard one of the raiders say in Arabic, “Okay, we won’t fight today.” I relaxed my finger, not believing my gun hadn’t fired at that exact instant. Nineteen carefully eased the pin back into his pineapple, and we continued on our way.
I should have died in ambushes a hundred times. Some of those times, I didn’t even know I was being ambushed. We were going through an LRA area once, and Peter kept grabbing hold of me and pulling me down as we were walking. I couldn’t figure him out. That night we were all sitting around at the compound talking about what had happened that day, and Peter was mad at me. Peter is hard to understand when he tries to speak English. He was telling me, “Pastor, you’re no good. You’re no good. The Bible says thou shalt not test the Lord thy God.” He was rattling on and on and finally I said, “Peter, what are you talking about?”
He said, “You’re walking today and the people are shooting at you and you just keep walking. The Bible says it’s wrong.”
“Peter, I didn’t know anybody was shooting at me.”
“Yeah, Pastor, they were shooting at you.”
All I could do was laugh, and the rest of the men joined in. I didn’t know the enemy was shooting because I never heard it. My hearing is pretty terrible. I drove construction equipment for years, and I blame some of my hearing loss on that. But I believe a lot of it is from the bombings. I was in bombings in Sudan that made my ears ring for three days. Even now I can’t hear a cell phone ringing, so I keep mine on vibrate. Getting older doesn’t help matters any. It’s getting bad when you think your cell phone’s vibrating and you reach for it and it’s not there—it’s just your body going numb.
Even in the middle of all the fighting and danger, little moments and thoughts come around that lighten our days. There was a time when I’d had it with people ambushing our food trucks, so I came up with a plan. I was going to dress all my soldiers up as women—put dresses on them and tie their guns under their dresses—and let them travel through the bush with sodas and beer on the truck. The LRA wouldn’t shoot to kill because naturally they would want the women for sexual pleasure, but when they stopped them, those dresses would come up and they’d have a problem on their hands.
I planned that countermove for the longest time, and then the ambushes slacked off. One day I swear I’ll use it.
TWO
whatever it takes
Nimule is three miles or so down a stray ribbon of choking red dirt that passes for a road in Southern Sudan. There isn’t much to the place once you get there—a few streets lined with concrete and tin buildings, a cluster of stores, electric lights here and there, a tangle of bicycles, motor scooters, and tired-looking old cars and trucks bobbing around people and animals in the road. But at least you have the sense you’re somewhere.
I, on the other hand, was nowhere: a patch of ragged, untamed scrub and underbrush without a sign that man had ever been there. This was the grassland version of the African jungle from the Tarzan movies. Instead of a canopy of leaves and long grape vines to swing on, I was surrounded by acacia trees, tall grass, and matted tangles of weeds. Underfoot was a world-class collection of critters that sting, bite, and pinch, including scorpions, spiders the size of my hand, and some of the deadliest snakes on earth.
A hundred yards away, a little finger of the White Nile flowed north, just starting its long meander from Lake Victoria in the heart of Africa all the way to Cairo and the Mediterranea
n. Though there were mountains rising up a dusty, hazy purple in the distance, the land around me was flat, so the river moved slowly, whirring and burbling along in no hurry, which is the way most of Africa is.
I hacked away enough brush to lay out my sleeping mat and hang my mosquito net from a tree branch. Sunset comes fast this close to the equator, and I wanted to get settled before dark. A breeze from the river stirred up the still, heavy air that had been baking all day in the tropical sun. Afternoon temperatures routinely top 110 degrees in Southern Sudan, but the nights are mercifully cool. Stretching out on my mat that first night, I looked up through the netting at the stars. I don’t know if there are actually that many more stars in Africa than anywhere else or if it just looks that way. The sky is so dark and smooth and clear it makes the stars sparkle like diamonds on black leather, glowing softer and fainter as you drift off to sleep.
From sound asleep to trembling with an adrenaline rush took no more than a heartbeat. The first sensation I had was a big, rough hand over my mouth. I opened my eyes and looked into the face of a Dinka warrior inches from my own, his clan marked by bold, shiny scars cut into his forehead like sergeant stripes. It was Ben, my bodyguard, assistant, and friend, who’d been sleeping a few steps away. With one fluid motion he reached up and cut down my mosquito net with his knife, then held his finger to his lips. We lay motionless side by side on the ground, holding our breath, trying not to make a sound. I hadn’t heard whatever Ben had as a warning, but I heard them now, a rhythmic rustling sound coming from the tall, dry grass. Following his eyes in the direction of the river, I saw dim outlines rimmed in moonlight. The Lord’s Resistance Army. Forty, maybe fifty soldiers leaning forward, walking quickly, efficiently through the underbrush lugging weapons, ammo, and supplies.
These were the crazed—some said demon-possessed—rebels who’d been terrorizing northern Uganda and Southern Sudan for years with bloody raids on isolated villages, attacking men, women, and children alike with animal brutality, disfiguring them with machetes, burning them alive, forcing acts of cannibalism. Some of the uniformed shapes were too small to be soldiers. Those would be the children, kidnapped, brainwashed, and forced to mimic the deadly work of their captors.
Which is why I was there.
Though I wasn’t exactly prepared for a firefight, I’d faced longer odds plenty of times. One thing about life on the edge with God is that you’re fearless. Might as well be. There’s nothing to lose because you’ve already given it all away.
I only had two weapons with me, but they’d gotten me through more tight spots than I could count: a well-worn Bible and a well-oiled AK-47, Russian made, reliable, and good for six hundred fully automatic rounds a minute. As quietly as possible, I rolled over and cradled the AK, flicked off the safety switch with my right thumb, and waited. Ben had his AK too. We watched the troops go by, saw the last one disappear through the tall grass, then listened for a long minute. All we heard was the river in the distance and the insects and night animals all around. When we were sure the last soldier was gone, Ben went back to his spot, and I retied my net, stretched out on my mat, and drifted back toward sleep watching those incredible stars.
The first time I saw that scruffy patch of land was on my third trip to Africa, driving a mobile clinic that brought medicine to people in the bush displaced by the LRA. I had seen refugees in one remote village that were so sick and felt God calling me to start a medical ministry to them. I said, “Okay, God, I’ll do it, but you’re going to have to come up with the truck.” The next time I was back home in America, I tried to raise some money for the project, but only collected about a thousand dollars. A few days before I was supposed to go back to Sudan, my wife phoned me on the road and said a man had called to ask how much the mobile clinic would cost. She told him thirty-three thousand dollars.
The man and I talked on the phone, and he said he wanted to give me the balance of what I needed. He asked, “How much do you have left to raise?” I told him, “Thirty-two thousand dollars.”
That surprised him. He said, “I thought you were collecting donations.”
“We are,” I explained, “but so far we’ve only got a thousand.”
He didn’t plan on donating so much money to the cause, but he was a man of his word. I didn’t know this guy, had never seen him before in my life, but he met me at the Washington airport and gave me thirty-two thousand dollars cash in a paper sack. With that miraculous windfall we were able to buy a safari vehicle, an overgrown white Land Cruiser with a big sunroof and benches in the back with room for thirteen people to squeeze in.
A lot of displaced people in the bush couldn’t walk to town to see a doctor. Their homes had been burned by the LRA, their families killed and maimed. The local relief agencies were afraid to send medical help for fear of more rebel attacks. There’s no doubt it was a dangerous place to be. I organized trips with the Land Cruiser to bring medicine to the villages, even though as a mzunga I was a prize target for rebel sharpshooters.
Once in a while, we had doctors or nurses from the U.S. helping us as volunteers, but most of the time the medical teams I took in were Sudanese locals. We always had several of my soldiers with us too, both for our own protection and to safeguard the villagers who came to see us. Where there were roads, we drove into settlements and set up under the trees, working out of the back of the Land Cruiser as people crowded around. For the villages we couldn’t drive to, we got as close as we could and then the workers carried the supplies the rest of the way, sometimes up to two miles. We had four big rectangular metal boxes about two feet deep painted red with black tops and “Mobile Clinic” written on the sides. Inside each one was a stack of trays with medicines and supplies, kind of like a giant tackle box. Our Sudanese helpers carried them balanced on their heads. Whether we had medical doctors along or not, we brought all kinds of medicine and equipment—morphine, sutures, you name it. We could do almost anything, and we did, from sewing up gunshot wounds to treating fevers and spider bites. When we had the money, we also brought food with us to give away. We’d give each family who came to see us a couple of scoops of rice or beans.
One day I was driving along outside Nimule when God gave me this sudden powerful feeling that I should stop my car. One of the soldiers with me then said, “What are you doing, Pastor?” I said, “I just want to look around here a little bit.”
There was nothing there at the spot but woods and underbrush. At least that’s what I saw, but God spoke to me inside my heart. This is where I want you to build my children’s home. Build it here. The LRA had orphaned thousands of children. They’d kidnapped them and forced them into service as porters, sex slaves, and child soldiers, abducting them from burning villages as they saw their parents hacked with machetes or murdered. When the kids escaped or were rescued, some of them had no families to return to because they were the only ones who’d survived the attack. They needed a safe place to live and go to school, a place where they could be kids without worrying about getting attacked or abducted. A place to help them piece their lives back together and look with hope toward the future.
And this was the place God had chosen for them.
I, however, had no plans whatsoever for a children’s home in Africa. I was busy running a mobile clinic. I was also a pastor with a wife and daughter back in Pennsylvania and a church to lead. I had no financial support for a children’s home, and no idea where to start.
God said, Start here.
I found out who owned the land. I had hoped it was government property because then I could probably lease it for next to nothing, but it turned out it belonged to a wealthy old man in town named Festus, whose family had farmed hundreds of acres of land and grazed their cattle on it for generations. I went to see him and asked if I could buy the forty acres I’d seen.
“This land has been in my family for hundreds and hundreds of years,” he said, “but yes, I will sell it to you.”
When the local authorities learned tha
t I’d bought the land, one of the officials came to me and said, “Pastor, the LRA will kill you out here! They come through this area all the time. Build your project in Nimule where it’s safer.” All the NGOs in the region were set up in town.
“No,” I said, “I can’t do that. God wants his children’s home here, and this is where I’m going to put it. He will protect us.”
The official’s remark reminded me of what my dad always used to say: “Boy, somebody’s gonna kill you one of these days.”
Maybe one day they’ll both be right, but not while I’ve got work to do.
I went home to Pennsylvania and told my church and my family about the plan. I think they were shocked by the scope of the project, considering we had no clue how to do it and no resources to do it with. But by that time I’d been springing African schemes on them for years, and they were sort of used to it.
Two months later I was back in the bush to camp out on the land and start clearing it. When I got to Nimule, a soldier named Ben William came to see me. As I said earlier, his lanky build and coal-black skin identified him as a Dinka, a prominent tribe in Southern Sudan. He also sported the decorative scars his people have, often made bolder by rubbing ashes in the cut. I’d met Ben earlier in another part of Sudan, and he heard I was coming to build a home for the war orphans. Not knowing when I’d be back, he stayed in town, sleeping out in the open and just getting by from day to day, confident that I’d return. He found out I was there and looked me up.
This tough, fearless soldier gave me a big hug and said, “Pastor, I’m here to be your servant.” And that was it. He scarcely left my side from then on. We drove out to the land I’d bought with a Bible, a mosquito net, and a couple of AK-47s. The first night we were there was when the LRA came through. Rebels or no rebels, we had a job to do. The next morning, Ben and I grabbed some hand tools and started clearing the tall grass. Once we had enough space we built ourselves a tukul. These houses are maybe ten or twelve feet across and you can build one in four days or so. If you make a fire inside, it’s smoky all the time because there’s no chimney or even a hole in the top. The smoke drifts up and works its way through the thatched roof. From outside it looks as though the whole thing is on fire.
