by Sam Childers
The first way station between America and our Children’s Village in Nimule is the international airport at Entebbe, just outside the capital city of Kampala on Lake Victoria. With 1.5 million people, about the same population as Philadelphia or Phoenix, Kampala is by far the largest city in Uganda. It’s a modern city with tall buildings, traffic jams (people drive on the left, a legacy of the British), noise, smoggy air, and busy shops. Although it’s directly on the equator, the city is blessedly cool and green thanks to the lake and the four-thousand-foot altitude. The outdoor markets are awash in the brightly colored robes of shoppers looking over piles of fresh tomatoes, potatoes, cucumbers, peppers, and other produce piled on cloths spread out over the pavement.
When we first set up headquarters in Kampala, we had a one-bedroom apartment with bunk beds in the living room. Today the ministry leases a fine guesthouse there—palm trees out front, tile floors throughout, comfortable beds for eighteen people—and earns some income by hosting visitors. Before we had the apartment during those earliest visits, even the cheap hotels were too expensive. I couldn’t make my house payment back in Pennsylvania, much less fund a ministry halfway around the world.
In those days I stayed at what looked like a vintage motel on the outskirts of Kampala because it was the cheapest place in town. It was a C-shaped building with a courtyard in the middle, old and threadbare, but always clean. I soon found out that the reason it was so economical is because this “guesthouse” was actually a whorehouse. There was a good-sized sitting room with a TV and stereo, and couches lined the walls all the way around. Four or five girls were always waiting there for men to come in and take their pick. Some of my soldiers and I started having Bible studies in that room. We never preached or pushed or tried to convert anybody. But the customers would come in and see that we were soldiers and then get out of there quickly. The management didn’t run us off because they were too afraid of us. Some of the girls started joining us for the Bible study. Over the year or so when I stayed there, several of the girls had a change of heart about their careers, left for more wholesome work, and never came back.
We had the same low budget when it came to meals, so we went from our rooms in the whorehouse to some of the cheapest restaurants in Kampala. I’m talking fish soup and a hunk of maize bread for a dollar. I’m talking places where missionaries would look you in the eye and say, “Don’t eat there. You’ll die eating in places like that!” But that was all the money I had. I didn’t want to eat there, but I ate there without complaining, just like I stayed in the whorehouse without complaining. I believe I was blessed because I stayed and ate in those places. I drove mangy old vehicles most people wouldn’t even ride in. I bought used tires and carried four or five old ones on my vehicle’s roof because I couldn’t afford new ones, and the roads were so bad that tires blew out all the time. I did this, not for a few trips, or a few months, but for years.
In Gulu, between Kampala and the Sudanese border, where I buy supplies, we went to the cheapest boarding house we could find. Sometimes six of us would sleep in the same room. When I first started coming to Africa, I paid all my own expenses and funded the work I was doing out of my own pocket. But as I spent less and less time running my construction company, my income started melting away. I still had plenty of work, but without me at the job site, projects that should take a week were taking two weeks, so instead of making two thousand dollars on the job, I was making five hundred. Or nothing. Or actually losing money on the deal. On top of that I got cheated by clients who made changes to work orders and then wouldn’t pay for them. One deal cost me twelve thousand dollars, and another set me back twenty thousand dollars. I was too busy to argue.
The bills started piling up, and my wife and the rest of my family and friends thought I was crazy to keep going. “If God is in this, why are you so broke?” they wanted to know. “If God is in this, why doesn’t he bless you with the resources you need to carry out his plans?” Call it spiritual warfare, call it a test of faith; it was a very hard time in my life that lasted for years. There was a time when I was afraid my marriage was going to be over. I was afraid my wife was going to leave me because she thought I was nuts. I had become fanatical.
In some ways the worst thing of all was the strain it put on our daughter, Paige. My African mission wasn’t her vision. All she knew was that her father was spending his time and the family’s money on children thousands of miles away instead of on her. She was in danger of losing her home. She was buying her clothes at secondhand thrift shops while her friends were snapping up the latest fashions at the mall. If you were a twelve-year-old girl, would that make any sense to you?
Maybe the worst of the worst was the day she asked me, “Dad, why do you love the African children more than me?” I’m pretty tough, but that punch in the gut was more than I could take. Looking into her wounded eyes as she waited for an answer absolutely tore my heart out. How could I explain it? I could only pray that God would eventually give her wisdom and understanding to know what I was doing and why.
Somehow I pushed on in spite of the financial strain and the burden it put on my wife and daughter. There were times when I thought we’d all go crazy. And yet, even when I was losing everything I had, I would get up behind my pulpit and preach that Jesus is the only way, the only answer, and preach it with a smile. I had to go through the storm with my head held high.
For years the only time any of us got any clothing was when a supply of donated clothes would come in for a shipping container headed for Africa. I hauled a trailer around to the churches that supported us and filled it with clothes. Before we filled the container, we went through the donations, picked out some things we could wear, and kept them for ourselves. During part of that time, I drove a tractor trailer for Feed the Children, a worldwide relief agency based in Oklahoma City. I picked up donated food once a month and delivered it to the food pantries they supplied. I rented the truck and charged the food pantries a delivery fee. My income from that put groceries on our table for almost a year.
If God tells you to do something, before he opens up the door and blesses you with the means to do it, he’s going to take you down to nothing. He’s going to make sure you have enough faith to be trusted with his work. The low point in my struggle came when we had a crucial need for the ministry and a foreclosure notice on our house at the same time. We had gotten way behind in our mortgage payments because we were sending everything we had to Africa, and I wasn’t making money from construction anymore. I had sold my rental property and land, had auctioned off my construction equipment, and was totally dedicated to the children of Sudan.
I’d just come home from Africa and already absorbed one shock. A few weeks earlier, my wife came outside in the morning, and my truck was gone. She reported it stolen to the police, and they called back later in the day and said, “Ma’am, nobody stole your truck; they repossessed it.” Now she was telling me to sit down at the kitchen table because we had something to talk about.
She handed me a letter. It was a foreclosure notice. I starting crying and asked, “How much money do we have?”
She said, “Two thousand dollars.”
“How much do we need to stop this foreclosure?”
“Two thousand dollars.”
How do you look your wife in the eye—your life partner who depends on you and trusts you to support her and keep her safe—and say, “Well, yes, by some great miracle we do have the money to pay the mortgage, but I’m going to send it to our ministry instead, which means we’ll soon be out on the street”?
I slammed the notice down on the table and bawled, “They can have the house! Send the money to Africa!” Then she started to cry too. I couldn’t stand to watch her, so I walked away.
I sent the money to Africa.
We didn’t lose our house. At the last possible minute we scraped up enough money to hold off the foreclosure. And that was when our financial picture started to change. We still have that house in Pe
nnsylvania today, plus the guesthouses in Kampala and Gulu, plus a forty-acre orphanage compound. When I was willing to sacrifice everything I had for Africa, then—and only then—God began showering down blessings on me, my family, and my ministry. Now when I go to Africa, I don’t have to eat for a dollar; I can buy the finest meal in town. I drive new vehicles and buy new tires, paid for in cash. When my tires are half worn, I give them to somebody who needs a blessing. I lease one of the finest houses in Kampala, valued at a quarter of a million dollars.
I know there are people who say, “All that guy wants to do is brag about what he has.” They’re absolutely right! But it’s not about what I have or what I have achieved; it’s about what God did. I give all the glory to him. When he saw the faithfulness, then the favor came. The blessings poured down on us to the point where anything we touched began to prosper.
I wish money wasn’t such a big deal. It can surely sidetrack people who are trying to do good works, and it can be a serious distraction that draws attention away from the real focus. It reveals how close to the surface greed and selfishness are, even in the most well-meaning people. And the more institutionalized and bureaucratic an organization is, the more money seems to be a problem, the more waste there is, and the less traction and productive work gets done. Maybe it’s not that we need more money donated to charity; we just need to spend it more wisely. In the great scheme of things, our ministry is tiny, with a budget well under a million dollars a year. That still sounds like a lot until you consider that Americans spend six billion dollars a year on potato chips.
Big budgets don’t ensure good stewardship or success in delivering aid. Actually, I think you could make a case for the idea that the more money a relief organization has, the less wisely they spend it.
I say this not from reading a report somewhere, but from personal experience. In northern Uganda, one particular NGO has been hauling in food, medicine, and supplies for many, many years. A few years back when the fighting was really bad, the truck drivers working for this organization stopped hauling all supplies because of the ambushes on the road. They wouldn’t go into the area where I was working because they were afraid to die. The NGO wouldn’t make their truck drivers go in.
This NGO then hired me to haul their supplies for them. That’s how we lost our supply truck in 2005. Our driver was speeding through a dangerous area, but once he got to safety he couldn’t slow down fast enough and rolled the truck. So we had to get another one. But because of greed, or whatever you want to call it, the organization paid me a fraction of what they were getting paid to deliver their stuff into the hot zone. I did the work for less than it cost me to operate my vehicles. I couldn’t even pay for tires out of what I was paid.
An ambushed vehicle
Why would I do this outfit’s work for them and then let them hog the lion’s share of the money? Because I was there. Unlike some administrator behind a desk somewhere, I had seen the suffering. I lived with these people. I had to watch what happened to people when supplies didn’t get through.
What I want to know is why it’s easy for a big organization to get millions of dollars through the system, only to end up afraid to deliver the goods, while an organization like mine that is not afraid of war and is willing to go over and beyond to save a life has to struggle so hard with only what we raise ourselves. Untold millions of dollars are misused every year by huge, well-funded organizations that get money from the government.
As hard as it is to figure out why this happens, an even more important question is why the United States trades with and sells military equipment to its enemies. This is international diplomacy at its most insane and most deadly. We trade with countries that are out to undermine us with our own dollars, including Sudan and other radical Islamic countries. People are dying because of it, and I know one man who paid with his life for trying to learn the truth.
In 2000, a man named Steve Snyder with International Christian Concerns (ICC) came to me and said, “Sam, I want you to take me to Sudan and show me everything the U.S. is doing to fuel the war in Southern Sudan.” ICC is an organization that spotlights persecution of Christians around the world, including countries that trade heavily with the U.S. I said I would show him what he wanted to see. I took him to the front lines of the Sudanese civil war, just north of the Uganda–Sudan border. There I showed him F-5 rocket launchers with U.S. military serial number plates that had been sold to the Muslim government of Sudan, a government that has been bombing and murdering its own citizens for decades. I took photos of them.
I have no doubt government officials will deny it. They have to. They’ll say, “Aw, this man is a liar. He’s an uneducated gorilla and he’s as bad as the rebels he’s been fighting with.” But the fact is that the weapons I showed Steve were sold in violation of the Geneva Convention, which says you can’t sell weapons to any country in the middle of a war. For the Americans to do what they wanted while still following the letter of the law, the actual transaction and exchange of money took place in Kenya. Steve Snyder found it.
Two months before he died, Steve came to my church and looked me in the face and said, “Sam, I think somebody’s going to end up killing me, and I think it’s going to be our government.”
I laughed and said, “Oh yeah, Steve. Come on!”
He said, “No, I’m serious.” Two months later, healthy Steve Snyder died of a rare blood disease under mysterious circumstances.
I’ll say it: I believe Steve was killed. He was rattling too many chains in high places. He got a phone call from the White House that literally told him, “Drop it all. Let it go. You don’t know what you’re getting into.” He refused, and soon he was dead.
Greed will lead America down the path to disaster if we don’t start thinking about what we’re doing. We cannot trade with an Islamic country that leans toward radicalism in any way. We can’t sell them our surplus weapons. We can’t pretend everything’s all right when it isn’t. These people hate us. They’re out to destroy us. They blew up the marine barracks at the U.S. embassy in Beirut, blew up the USS Cole guided-missile destroyer in 2000, blew up the World Trade Center in 2001, and no doubt plan on blowing up other American property and taking American lives. And we’re selling (or giving!) them whatever they need to do it with. The radical Muslim world wants to run America; I believe unless we rethink our approach, it’s going to end up happening.
We need to spend our money a different way. A few years back, the U.S. government gave three million dollars cash for the care of some refugee camps, which were housing people who Joseph Kony and the LRA displaced. A newspaper interviewed me and asked me what I thought about it.
I said, “I think we got a bunch of stupid people in America. Why do we give three million dollars to feed these displaced people? If you put three million dollars into a refugee camp this month, you’ll need another three million next month, and another three million after that. Why don’t we just offer three million dollars for Kony’s head? You could stop that fight then in no time. It would be a bargain.”
As I write this, peace talks have been going on between Joseph Kony and the government of Sudan for more than two years. That’s a lot of hotel rooms and breakfast buffets, and America has probably paid for the bulk of it. All to try and deal in a civilized way with a rebel maniac who’s a total nutcase. Once in the middle of a meeting of LRA leaders to discuss the peace talks, Kony didn’t like what one of his commanders, Vincent Otti, said. What I heard was that Otti recommended that they surrender to the international court and try to negotiate some kind of deal. In response, Kony pulled a pistol and killed him at the table with a shot to the forehead. When people asked later if Kony had really murdered one of his own lieutenants, he said, “No, he’s only sleeping.” This became a big inside joke. And we’re talking peace with someone like that? Every day we waste talking, more people are killed.
Action is the language Kony and Islamic radicals understand, and the more we speak it, the better.
It never has bothered me being accused of being a mercenary, even though I’m not. The story got started when a few people in northern Uganda and a few groups in Southern Sudan didn’t like what I was doing and started spreading that rumor. But one group that was bad-mouthing me—I won’t mention the name—was ambushed along the road one day, and they sure loved it when my soldiers and I came along and escorted them safely into Gulu. I was the savior that day. Suddenly I wasn’t this terrible mercenary after all.
There were stories that I used donations from Christians to buy guns and ammo. I have never bought a single weapon in Africa—machine gun, any kind of gun, grenade, ammunition, you name it—with ministry money or my own money. Every weapon I’ve ever had was given to me by African governments to protect the people around me, protect the children I’ve rescued, and protect and rebuild their country.
A lot of people said things about me in the past, but when the bullets are flying and their rear ends are on the line, they have a radically different perspective. If you go to Gulu and start asking questions about me to some of the Red Cross, World Vision, and other aid workers, some will say ugly things. But most of them will say, “Yeah, some people call him a mercenary, but that guy’s been here for years, and he’ll go in and fight!”
I’ll fight anywhere, any time, and I have a dedicated group of SPLA soldiers who put their lives on the line for me every day.
One who’s been with me since the beginning is named Nineteen. Others who started out with our ministry left soldering to take higher positions in the provisional government of Southern Sudan when it was formed in 2005. Nineteen was one who said, “No, my higher-up position is with the pastor.” He sticks with me.
Deng has also been with me a long time. My favorite story about him happened the first time he ever went on a trip with me. He was on the roof of the car with his AK, and we were ambushed. When I stopped the vehicle to grab my weapon, Deng did a Rambo jump off the roof onto the hood, firing like crazy, and put a big dent in my hood.
