by Sam Childers
Once we finished the first tukul, we just kept clearing, going in a circle and making the area bigger and bigger. I got the master plan of the whole thing one night in a vision. I saw exactly what it would look like when it was finished, with a school, a clinic, dormitories, a kitchen, a library, and all the rest.
How could one American pastor and one sergeant in the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army possibly do anything like that?
They couldn’t. But with God everything is possible.
Even now I can see that first tukul in my mind, see the tree where my mosquito net hung from over the grass sleeping mat. When I look at what’s there now I start to cry tears of joy. People today see our Children’s Village in person, on our Web site, or on a DVD or TV show and can’t imagine that it started with a mosquito net hanging in a tree.
These are the dormitories at Children’s Village where the children sleep safely every night.
There’s no way it would have happened without Christ. No way.
Building an orphanage was definitely a long way from what I had in mind when I started going to Africa. I hadn’t come there originally to help the children. I’d come to do some roofing work in a town up the road. But one young child, whose name I’ll never know, changed my plans. And my heart. And the course of my life.
The first trip I took to Sudan was near the end of 1998, after I heard a white South African pastor speak at our church about his plan to train chaplains for the Southern Sudanese army. Except for a few years during the 1970s and ’80s, Sudan has been at war with itself since 1955. The Arab Muslim north has forced its religion and culture on the south, which is mostly Christian or local African religions. The majority of the people and power have always been in the north, hammering away at the six million non-Muslims in the south and trying to make them convert to Islam. According to some tallies, as many as four million people have been driven from their homes during the decades of fighting, and two million killed. Two million.
In 1983 a Sudanese lieutenant colonel named John Garang, who’d gone to college in Iowa and studied military tactics at Fort Benning, Georgia, rebelled against his own government in Khartoum and formed the Sudanese People’s Liberation Army. This army defended people in the south who didn’t want to be Muslims. Though Garang and many of the other SPLA leaders were Christians, they didn’t try to force their faith on anybody. They weren’t—and aren’t—fighting for Christianity; they’re fighting to give people the freedom to worship any way they want to. This includes freedom to serve Christ, but it also includes freedom to follow their own local religion or no religion at all.
The SPLA wanted Christian chaplains, so the provisional government of Southern Sudan gave a South African pastor a bombed-out college compound to convert into a military chaplain school. The ruined buildings were in Yei, about a hundred miles west of Nimule as the sand grouse flies, though it’s a lot farther on the ground. Making the drive, there are some mountains to the south that you can see out the left side of the car, but other than that it’s a red dirt path through a grassy plain stretching to the horizon in every direction. In the dry season—spring and summer—your car kicks up a rooster tail of dust that hangs in the air and gets on and in everything. When the rains come, you go the whole way in four-wheel drive and hope the ruts don’t get too deep. The clay soil is slick as glass when it’s wet, so if you don’t get stuck, you slide all over the place. You have to carry all your gas, water, food, and anything else you might need. There’s no town between Nimule and Yei, and if there’s a building on the way, I can’t remember it.
Yei is a lot like Nimule—red dirt roads, concrete and tin buildings, plenty of people on foot, and bicycles everywhere. And it’s just as hot. At four degrees latitude above the equator, the sun broils everything, bleaches the sky white, and evaporates the clouds. The old college buildings there were bombed out and torn apart, really in rough shape. At that time in my life, I was a building contractor who’d been walking with the Lord for six years. This South African pastor asked me if I’d volunteer to help put new roofs on these buildings and do some other fixing up. I had never been to Africa in my life, never even thought about it. But I felt God calling me to go, so I said yes.
Five weeks later, I was in Yei. The old school buildings there were so broken apart we couldn’t stay in them at first, so we lived in a compound down the street run by the Catholic Church. I got the crew started at putting up steel and making repairs. I found an old welding machine that barely worked and used it to build a new front gate from junk pieces of steel lying around. In the end it wasn’t bad looking, and I guarantee it was solid. I fixed the bullet holes in the water tower and repaired the water pump where all the gaskets were rotted away. In the best of times there’s never much money in Sudan for preventive maintenance. Considering the heat and dust and rain—and the fact that people had been shooting up the place for fifteen years—it’s a wonder anything worked at all.
While we were there, the shooting and bombing went right on. Sometimes we’d hear the whine of government bombers in the distance, drop our tools, run outside, and jump in a hole that was the closest thing they had to a bomb shelter. One time the radical Muslims bombed only a block or so from where we were staying. Even at a distance, the sound is deafening, rocks and pieces of whatever the bomb hit fly through the air, and the ground shakes. If you’re lying on the ground, you feel it in your whole body. I thought to myself, This is what the people here live with, year after year, never knowing when the next strike will come, or the next wave of soldiers with torches and machetes.
The thing that turned five weeks in Yei into a lifetime mission in Africa for me was a metal disc about the size of a dinner plate. Radical Muslims had planted land mines all over the area, like they have in so many other places in Sudan. These Vietnam-era mines are cheap, reliable, and easy to use; and once they’re in the ground, they stay armed indefinitely, which is what makes them so dangerous to the local population. Northern armies plant them by the thousands just below the surface to maim SPLA soldiers. But once the fighting moves on, nobody comes back to clear the area. Setting them out is relatively safe and easy, but removing them once they’re armed is a very dangerous job, so they just leave them in the ground. These northern troops even set out minefields in places soldiers don’t typically go in hopes of injuring innocent civilians as part of their campaign of intimidation and terror.
The road to Juba, miles and miles of which are still under construction to remove land mines
Coming into town, there were places where I saw the bodies of people killed by mines or massacred by soldiers. Not bodies really, just skeletons. Between the climate and the scavengers, dead flesh doesn’t last long, though even at that, the sick-sweet smell of rot hung in the air. In one massacre outside of town, five thousand people were killed. Skeletons were heaped on top of skeletons. You could feel death in the air.
The mines around Yei are a combination of antipersonnel mines and larger antitank mines, a handful of the more than one million scattered around the world, as dangerous fifty years later as the day they were set. The battle advances, markers and warning signs disappear, and people eventually forget the mines are in the ground until it’s too late. They’re not designed to kill, but to cripple. A dead soldier is a dead soldier, but a wounded one slows down his whole unit and diverts the focus temporarily from attacking and moving to medical treatment. So the antipersonnel mines are sized to blow off a foot or shatter a leg.
Assuming the victim is an adult. With boots.
One day I was walking through an area where a lot of people had lost their lives. Women, older people, anybody barefoot or wearing sandals could be killed. Nobody had come looking for these victims—probably because the rest of the family was already dead—and there’s no sort of organized government program for collecting the bodies, so they pile up around the minefields. Awful as it is, the sight is a very effective reminder to the living to be careful. I was with some of the other w
orkers, walking along and looking at the mangled corpses, when we came across the body of a child. From the waist down there was nothing. I couldn’t tell if it had been a boy or a girl. The lower half was just gone.
I stood over that little body, looking down at what had once been a precious child—playing, laughing, full of life and energy and hope, too young to despair, too young to hate. Running through this spot no more than a few days ago, perhaps playing a game? Finishing an errand? Chasing a pet? That child put a dusty, grubby little foot on a pressure cap that triggered a small explosive charge. There was a pop! and a flash that lasted only a second. But by the time it was over, the child was already dead and dismembered. One more anonymous casualty out of millions.
I started to weep. I couldn’t stand to look at it, and yet I couldn’t turn my head. The image blurred, then cleared again, as tears filled my eyes and spilled down my face.
“I will do whatever I have to do to help the people of Sudan.”
It was my voice but it didn’t feel like the words were coming from me.
“Lord, I tell you now, I’ll do whatever I have to do to help these people. These children. I’ll do it! Whatever it takes, Lord! Whatever it takes!” I kept saying the same thing over and over. “Whatever it takes. Whatever it takes.” Some presence had a hold of me in that moment that would change my life from then on. I didn’t know what the change would look like or how it would happen. All I knew was that it was there.
But how could that be possible? I owned a construction company and business was booming. I owned rental property and land. Against very long odds, Sam Childers, high school dropout and former drug dealer, had grabbed a piece of the American dream. Yet standing over half of a tiny body outside a dirt-road town in the middle of an African plain halfway around the world, suddenly none of that mattered.
My first day home back in the States, I went to my mom’s for breakfast. Even though I’d been married for years, it was kind of a tradition for me to have breakfast with Mom several mornings a week since Dad passed away. She lived across the street from me in the house where I’d lived as a boy, a trailer my dad had hauled to the site then added rooms and a permanent roof to, all painted bright white and accented with a big, black-and-white checkerboard design on the garage doors. I was sitting at the kitchen table where I’d sat hundreds of times before, surrounded by all the familiar sounds and smells of a home-cooked breakfast on the way. But my mind was a long way off.
Mom looked over at me. You can’t fool a mom. She asked, “Sam, are you okay?”
I tried to answer, but the words wouldn’t come. I broke down in tears. Finally I managed, “No, I’m not.”
She didn’t say anything else; just sat down by me and let me cry awhile. Then she asked softly, “What’s wrong?”
I looked over at her, red-eyed, and said, “I think I left a piece of me in Africa.” And I put my face down on her shoulder and sobbed like a child.
THREE
a lot of stuff
“Boy, somebody’s gonna kill you one of these days!”
From the time I was a boy until just before he died, my dad probably told me that a thousand times. He didn’t say it in a serious way—sometimes it came out almost like a joke, even though it had some bite to it. It was his shorthand way of telling me I was tenacious, tough, mean, and either too brave or too stupid to be afraid of anybody. That sort of focus and drive can be a great tool for achieving success, if success is your goal. It can also be a great tool for immorality, mischief, and high-impact hell-raising if that’s what you’re after, which was the choice I preferred in my youth. I’d heard stories about Dad’s early days, the boxing and his hitch in the Marine Corps, and I wanted to be like what I thought he was. Turns out that I got it all twisted up, though I don’t think he ever knew how far off track I went.
Paul Childers was a Christian man who worked hard and fought hard. He was my hero. He quit school in the third grade to make money during the Depression. His mother, a Cherokee Indian, died when he was about five, and his father died a few years later. So from the time he was fourteen or so, he raised himself. He hopped a freight train to Florida and learned a trade. As a union ironworker for more than fifty years, he always had a job in good times and bad because he would work harder than anybody else. He was medium height with thick arms and a solid build. He had dark hair and a square face with deep-set eyes, a no-nonsense mouth, and the broad nose and prominent cheekbones of his mother’s Cherokee ancestors.
Dad met my mother when she was seventeen and he was about twenty-eight. It wasn’t until near the end of his life any of us knew he’d been married before, but he was like that—very private about his personal history. Mom and Dad moved from place to place following the big construction projects. I was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota, where Dad was working on a missile plant. I think they made Minuteman nuclear ICBMs there, or maybe it was an underground installation where they kept them on alert during the Cold War. I had two older brothers, Paul Jr. and George. After George I had a sister, Donna, but she died of a heart problem before she was a year old. Dad took her death hard, but being Dad he just kept on working, even though sometimes at night he would hold her pajamas in his arms and cry and cry. Mom had a nervous breakdown. She was so eaten up by what she lost that she couldn’t be a mom to the two boys she had.
One day she was looking out the window at my brothers swinging in the yard, and God spoke to her. He reminded her that she had two other children and told her she still had something to live for. Starting then, she began to reconnect with her family and the world around her.
Before they lived in Grand Forks, my family had lived in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. One day she’d gone to church there, and the pastor prophesied that she would have another child who would be a minister. Not long after that was when they moved, and a pastor in Grand Forks gave her the same prophecy. She went home from church all happy and, as she’s always told the story, I was conceived that night. Two other times—once in the womb and again when I was five or six years old—other pastors prophesied that I would be a preacher. Through the years, my mother always held on to those prophecies, even at times when people with less faith would have long since thrown in the towel.
I couldn’t have been more than about nine years old when I felt God’s hand on me for the first time. It was at my great-grandmother’s funeral at the old Assembly of God church in Central City, Pennsylvania, where we were living by then. It bothered me to see all those people crying over my great-grandmother and missing her so much. They seemed so lost and so sad. I had gone into the bathroom and was looking at myself in the mirror. At that moment I said to God, “I want to help these people. I don’t want them to feel like this.” I remember the compassion I had for the people at that moment, how strongly I felt it and how real it seemed. Somehow I knew that mourners could make it through the pain and loss, and that somehow I could help them do that. As much wrong as I did later in life and as many people as I hurt, I can say that God never stopped talking to me. I just stopped listening.
In the spring of 1974, a couple of months before I turned twelve, we moved back to Grand Rapids. I was going into seventh grade that fall, and the two years between then and when I started high school were some of the most influential times of my life. That’s when I fine-tuned the outlook and the behavior that landed me in the moral and spiritual cesspool where I spent so much of my life. At the time, I loved every minute of it. I know now that if I’d died then or any time for years afterward I would have gone straight to hell.
Before we left Central City, I had already discovered cigarettes, marijuana, and alcohol. The first time I ever smoked pot had surprised my brother George when he was toking in the barn.
“I’m gonna tell!” I shouted, like a typical little kid who got the goods on his older brother.
“Here, take a drag,” he said and held out the joint. I hesitated. “Here! Smoke it!” It wasn’t an invitation; it was an order. I took a puff.
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br /> “Now you’ve smoked it too. If you tell on me, I’ll tell on you!” He had me. Besides, the sensation I got from the smoke was fantastic. It felt really good. Pot was wonderful stuff.
Even though my first experience with illegal drugs came from my brother, I can’t blame him for my early attraction to alcohol and pot. I had always liked hanging out with older boys, and part of being accepted was to do what they did. When you’re only eleven and the teenagers will let you run with them if you do what they do, you’ll do whatever it takes to be recognized as a member of the group.
My family bought a piece of land in Cohasset, outside Grand Rapids, and right away I started meeting a lot of guys in the community. One of my favorite buddies was named Allen Pierce. He was the same age as me, and we clicked right off the bat. Growing up, I always looked older than I was, which helped me fit in with the older boys I wanted to pal around with. I had an allowance from my parents, plus a job delivering newspapers, meaning there was always plenty of money to buy whatever I wanted. And what I wanted was drugs.
Seventh grade was a blast. It seemed like every day we were smoking cigarettes and pot at school. By the next year I was taking white cross, an addictive amphetamine, or “upper,” that came as a white pill with a cross on it. It gave me a boost of energy and kept me awake and wired so I wouldn’t miss anything. The same year I also discovered LSD. When I used it, it gave me wild visions of patterns, imaginary animals, kaleidoscopic lights that sparkled and melted, and fantastic out-of-body experiences. My friends and I would spend our time either at the Cohasset baseball field—where we smoked and drank in the dugouts—or under the Mississippi River bridge at the edge of town. Sometimes we slept under the bridge all night, and in the summer we dove off of it.
