by Sam Childers
The local witch doctors were less dangerous but just as opposed to our faith. Witch doctors are powerful and influential figures in the villages, jealous of anything that might diminish their standing in the eyes of their people. They call on spirits to bring good luck, heal the sick, ensure victory in battle, and ease the pain of childbirth (among other things) using a combination of chants, powders, potions, dances, icons, and trinkets. To them, pills and shots are dangerous and unproven—Christianity, even more so.
Not long after the orphanage opened, I was in a village near Yei when the people there told me their witch doctor wanted to kill me. He’d had enough of mzunga spirits and medicine, and was ready to get rid of the competition. The villagers had no doubt he could cast a spell and finish me off. As I stood talking with a family in the doorway of their tukul, who should come around the corner but Mr. Witch Doctor himself.
He stopped twenty feet or so away and we stood there looking at each other. Everybody within sight of us quit what they were doing to turn and watch. The witch doctor didn’t wear any clothes but was covered with necklaces and wrist and ankle ornaments made out of feathers and bones. His wrinkled skin and white hair gave him an air of age and wisdom, but his eyes were wide like a madman. Nobody moved for a beat or two, then the witch doctor jumped straight up in the air and back down again—exactly like a cartoon character—and started dancing and jumping toward me, waving his hands and shouting; he was giving me the full treatment. He threw a bag of bones at my feet, chanting and dancing around me. I shoved him in the chest, really just to push him away, but he reacted as though a mighty force had pushed him. He went flying backward, started yelling again, scrambled to his feet, and ran away as fast as he could. The people in the village who had been hiding in their huts and peeking out their doors at the action poured outside, raising their hands and shouting with joy and excitement.
I couldn’t explain what happened then, and I can’t explain it now, other than to say I believe God showed the power of his presence to that witch doctor and his followers.
That was only a warm-up to another experience I had later that same year. I’m not asking you to believe or not believe anything; I’m just telling you what happened to me.
One night I went into my tukul and locked it from the inside. While I was sleeping, I felt something evil entering my room. That’s the only way I can describe it. It wasn’t a dream; it wasn’t my imagination; it was a real presence, and it radiated evil in dark, sinister rays. I woke up with a start, and as I groped around in the dark for my flashlight and pistol, God said to me, No, you begin to pray.
I started to argue. I wanted to see what was waiting at the foot of the bed to attack me, and I wanted to blow it to smithereens. But God was serious. It was kind of like when my parents used to holler at me; there was one holler that could be ignored without great consequence. But there was another tone of voice that you recognized immediately, stopping you in your tracks. That’s what happened that night.
I said, “No, Lord, I want to see what just came in the room.”
The Lord answered, No, start praying now.
I began to pray, pray, pray in the pitch dark, and after about three hours I prayed myself to sleep. When I woke up the next morning, I sat on the bed and rubbed my head.
Wow, man, I thought to myself. Was that a dream? What happened? I looked down at the concrete floor, and what I saw sent goose bumps shooting up my arms and all the way down my back: there was an unbroken, perfectly mounded circle of gray ash running the whole way around the bed. The line was about half an inch high and an inch wide. I started to cry.
“Lord, what happened?” I asked. My voice was so tight it came out in a ragged croak.
God said, Satan came to kill you last night, but he could not cross the blood line. He went around and around the bed, trying to break through, but he couldn’t break through my power.
I believe the ashes marked an invisible blood line around me created by prayer, and I believe Satan just kept going around and around and around my bed in a circle trying to get across it. I believe he could have broken through if I had stopped praying. Satan was waiting for it to be broken, and he was causing so much steam and power that it left a trail of burnt ash. The door was still bolted from the inside. Just thinking about it makes those goose bumps come back.
Most of my encounters in Africa have been less dramatic. One time early in the ministry, my soldiers Ben and Thomas and I were in Kampala shopping for supplies when a Muslim came into the store and started getting smart with me, criticizing me, criticizing my faith. This is an area where there are a lot of Muslims, so I figured this little guy could cause us some trouble. Sure enough, hearing the commotion, a knot of Muslims gathered around us in the store. In my typical shy and retiring fashion, I picked up an axe handle and put it under the mouthy Muslim’s chin; then I threw the handle on the table with a loud clatter. The Muslim and his buddies scattered, and I said a silent prayer. “Thank you, Lord, that the situation was handled without a fight.”
But when we left the store and went outside, the street was full of Muslims waiting for me. One of them came up to me and got in my face, running his mouth off about how my God was dead. I started to get hot, but Ben said, “Come on, Pastor, let’s go get in the car.” I gave the Muslim a look and turned around.
As we started to drive away, another guy stuck his face in the window and shouted, “Your God is dead!” I slammed on the brakes, threw open the door, and jumped out of the car. That startled him. Considering the Muslim mob around us, he wasn’t expecting me to do anything.
I headed straight for that little guy and said, “The Lord I serve is the living Lord Jesus. And to show you he’s alive, I’m going to send you to meet him right now!” But as I started to grab him, Ben grabbed me.
Ben is a big man and a good fighter. He got a tight grip on my shoulder and said, “Come on, Pastor, get in the car now!” I got back in the car. When I looked out, the street mob, maybe a hundred in all, had clubs and rocks and were getting ready to attack. But we drove off without a single rock being thrown.
As we drove out of town Ben said, “Pastor, I was willing to fight with you or die with you. Today I believe we would have died.” Fortunately Ben was there to bring me back to my senses.
That time I avoided a fight. Other times, I didn’t.
Before I had my house in Kampala, I was staying in a hotel there. Walking to my room one night, I noticed these two men following me. I stopped at the door before mine and acted like I was getting out my key. The two approached to rob me. As they rushed forward, I grabbed one of them by the back of the neck and slammed his head against the wall as hard as I could. His head hit with a dull thud, and blood spattered everywhere. The other guy turned to run, so I knocked his feet out from under him and, as he fell, I kicked him under the chin as hard as I could with my motorcycle boot. In seconds I had gone from a potential robbery victim to the winner of a two-on-one contest, with both of my opponents bleeding and unconscious on the floor. I got to my room as fast as I could, locked the door, and tried to go to sleep. I didn’t sleep much because I kept thinking I heard the guys waking up and heading for my door. Finally I drifted off, and when I woke up the hall was empty. I never saw those two again.
Sometimes the littlest enemies are the most dangerous. One night when Lynn and Paige were with me in Africa, I was lying in bed in the dark and felt something pinching my arm. I reached over with my other hand and felt a spider the size of my hand. I grabbed it and threw it across the room. The next morning there was a hole in my arm with some watery stuff oozing out of it. A few days later there was fever in the wound, and it had turned red and swollen. I knew I was in trouble and had to see what I could do about it, but didn’t want the girls to worry. I also didn’t want to be so sick I couldn’t take care of them.
I felt a knot growing under my skin. At first I thought it was the infection, maybe a knot of pus or something like that. But the more I looked and
poked around the open hole in my arm, the more I thought it was something else. At first I actually couldn’t bear to tell myself the truth, but the truth was it was a sac of spider eggs living in my arm. Since I could only reach the spot with one hand, I had to get Lynn to help me pull the sac out. I thought, Let’s please be careful and get this thing out of my arm without breaking it. That was the only thing I could think of that would be worse. We got it out, and as soon as we did, all this blood and water and pus came streaming out. The redness went away almost immediately, and soon my arm was as good as new.
There are a lot of aspects to life in Africa that you have to be willing to look at in a whole new way. Spider bites there set a whole new standard. So does the food. One of the truths you learn in the mission field is, “Where he leads me I will follow, and what he feeds me I will swallow.” The African diet is usually maize or maize bread, rice, and beans, with an occasional goat thrown in. It’s simple, nourishing, and even tasty, as long as it’s fresh, which isn’t for very long. Because there’s no electricity in much of Africa, there’s not much refrigeration; food spoils very quickly in the extreme desert climate. The locals seem to be used to it, but to Westerners who are used to having things sanitary and fresh, eating out in the bush can be a real challenge.
Once, we were traveling through the village of Tali and didn’t have a lot of food with us. I was really sick with a fever, I was hungry, and I knew I needed to eat something. I was eating some dried fish I’d gotten there and thought I saw something moving in the fish. I looked a little closer and realized it was maggots. I’d already eaten most of the fish and had surely swallowed handfuls of maggots without realizing it. I wondered how I could stand to be any sicker than I already was. But I never got any sicker.
Another time Deng and I were in the village of Moboko, and we hadn’t eaten all day. We bought some food, and I snarfed mine down in no time. As Deng was eating, he looked down and saw maggots all over his meal. I had already eaten all mine, and no doubt had a hearty dose of maggots in the process. I hadn’t been sick when I started eating, but the thought of those maggots inside me sure made me feel sick.
I’ve also eaten bush cat, which looks like a big house cat with a bushy tail. I’ve eaten dog and monkey, but I couldn’t stomach field rats. I’ve never been so hungry that I would eat one. They gross me out. I’ve eaten kob, which looks and tastes like deer, really delicious. And I’ve had termites, which you eat live after pulling the wings off; they are kind of sweet and crunchy. My favorite dish is fish head soup, which is a lot better than it sounds; it’s a whole fish cooked with a sauce and then poured over rice.
Through all these experiences—circumstances I’d usually tend to avoid as dangerous, crazy, or both—God has kept me in the palm of his hand. I know he’s there because he speaks to me in different ways. He can reach us through our emotions. It can be just having good feelings. Still there have been times when I literally heard the voice of God or the voice of Christ speak, and it is as though he’s sitting next to me.
He also speaks to me in a very special way through the children. Once, I returned to the orphanage at night and found a group of children sleeping on the ground outside the gate. Soldiers had kept the gate closed.
I said, “What’s going on here?”
One of the soldiers explained, “We didn’t want to do anything until we heard from you.”
I said, “Open these doors and let the children in!” The soldiers moved quickly, and I turned back to the children. “Come on in!” I said, sweeping them through the gate with my arms.
We had a church service a day or two later, and a little girl about eleven stood up and said, “They wouldn’t let me in, but I knew if I waited the gatekeeper would come and he would invite me in.”
As she spoke I started to cry. Then a boy about six stood up and said he’d had nowhere to live, so he lived under a tree in the market, living on food that shoppers dropped or left behind. Sometimes people would give him something, and sometimes he would steal. The orphanage was his refuge, his new beginning.
One of God’s most surprising messages to me was to spare the life of a murderer whom I was seconds away from killing. The Ugandan government had set up a place in Gulu for LRA commanders who were willing to give themselves up and accept an amnesty agreement. Guards protected them from revenge killings by other LRA honchos until they could settle somewhere else.
An important officer named Sam Kolo had turned himself in. A lot of my children knew him, and said he had hurt them and plenty of other people. The SPLA troops who worked with me—along with everybody else, it seemed—thought Kolo was too mean and had done too much wrong to deserve amnesty.
“This man needs to be killed,” they insisted. “Everybody knows this.”
If he’s that terrible, I thought, I’ll just even things up by taking care of him myself.
I told my soldiers that we would go to this place in Gulu and say we had come to interview Sam Kolo. We’d say that while we were talking to him, he flipped out and came at us with a knife, so we had to kill him in self-defense. I went there fully intending to leave with this killer’s blood on my hands.
The guards knew us and let us go in to interview Kolo without any guards present.
He and I started to talk. There was a frightening coldness about him. I could sense no emotion whatsoever. After a few minutes I asked him, “Don’t you have any remorse for what you have done?”
He looked at me and said, “No.”
That was all I needed. I had a big knife on me, and at that point I actually reached down and put my hand on the knife. I was going to cut his throat right there.
Then he paused, looked at me for a second, and said, “But you don’t understand. I was captured as a child.” He started telling me about being captured by the LRA years before and what they’d done to him. He was brainwashed as a boy. He never knew any better. We can say a child knows better, but when you capture a child at eleven years old and start brainwashing him and giving him drugs and making him kill, that child will have no idea of what’s right and wrong. A world of killing on command is the only world he knows. That’s what happened to Sam Kolo.
I took my hand off my knife. After we sat in silence for a minute I asked, “Do you feel like you need something more in your life?”
“Yes,” he answered.
“Have you ever heard about Jesus Christ?”
“I’ve heard of him a little.”
As I started filling in the gaps, Kolo hung on every word. I had come to kill him that day and send him to hell. Instead, I led him to eternal life in heaven. My soldiers stared open-mouthed at the two of us.
Finally Kolo and I parted company, and the soldiers and I headed out to the car. “But Pastor,” one of my men said, “I thought we came to kill this man. We’re leaving, and we did not do the job!” I didn’t know how to explain it. In a weird way I was disappointed because I’d thought so hard about what to do and how to do it. I was so focused on ending this murderer’s life, and then I didn’t do it. By the time I got back to my house in Gulu I felt God telling me that I did kill him. Actually God killed the old Sam Kolo through me. His old life of death and evil was gone, replaced with a new, clean, spotless life in Christ.
If we looked hard at every one of us for all the wrong we’ve done—the things we have in our closets, the things we hide, the things we’re going to have to answer for one day—there’s a lot of us that should be killed. And we were killed when we gave our hearts to Christ. All of the old is gone.
Why is it so easy for God to forgive us of all the dirt that we’ve done to him and other people, yet it’s so hard for us to forgive each other? Even if you’re a person who was influenced to murder, he will open his arms to welcome you as quickly as he does anyone else. All sinners are equally damned and everyone, no matter what they’ve done, can be equally forgiven and blessed.
Africa seems to have more than its share of dirt flying in every direction. That’s p
art of the reason why they’re dealing with so many troubles, and why it’s so hard to do anything about them.
TEN
war of the words
Follow the trail of any African crisis—lawlessness, poverty, genocide, lack of development, whatever—and you’ll probably end up at the same place: politics. With few exceptions, African politics are a messy combination of old tribal conflicts, leftover colonial squabbles, self-perpetuating military dictatorships, and the modern scramble for world oil. Weak governments and corrupt or inept leaders have caused generations of suffering all across the continent, including the bloody guerrilla wars that have victimized children in Uganda and Southern Sudan.
The good news is that both of these countries have been led by gifted, compassionate men—presidents who got to the top by military force but are men of peace who have done great things for their countries. I’ve had the honor of knowing President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda and the late John Garang, former president of Southern Sudan. I also have a lot of respect for Garang’s successor, Salva Kiir Mayadrit. Our orphanage and our ministry would not have the success they’ve had without the help of these men.
My introduction to African heads of state started with a phone call from the U.S. To help raise money for my work I’d set up a business providing guide services and security for groups traveling in Uganda and Sudan. I had the contacts, I had the soldiers, and I had the guns, so I figured I might as well let other people take advantage of them and bring in a little cash for the children. I got a call from The 700 Club on the Christian Broadcasting Network saying they were trying to get CBN news correspondent Gary Lane an interview with President Museveni. When they called Museveni’s office, the people there told them, “Sam Childers is the guy you need to get you in and out of the country,” and gave them my number. I set up their trip, including an interview with the president. I didn’t know then that I would get to spend time with the president too. Not only that, he and I would have a one-on-one conversation.
