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So I was in an optimistic state of mind when I got my starry-eyed self to South Sudan, ready to let the healing begin. The Shekinah Fellowship Children’s Village sat on donated land near the Ugandan border. Susan had been in touch with the organization
through an instructor from her school, and we knew they needed help. Our plan was to stay down the road at night and work in the orphanage during the day. A nearby church compound housed young soldiers training to be army chaplains, and they kindly took us in.

It seemed like the way to go. People might question the methods Sam Childers used, but nobody doubted his determination. He was born in America in 1961 and experienced years of youthful drug addiction while he wasted time with outlaw behavior. After a religious epiphany, he learned about the destructive work of a quasimilitary criminal gang with the dubious name of the Lord’s Resistance Army. Childers was outraged by the group’s sadistic policy of kidnapping children and drafting them into combat units, sometimes forcing these young people to shoot their own families before the LRA took them away.

I couldn’t help but resonate with the revulsion Childers expressed for the LRA tactics against children. Somehow, this man managed to carve out a place in the wilderness under the constant threat of torture and death by his LRA opponents. My admiration for his courage was probably the thing most responsible for bringing me to that place.

I was running on momentum and brushed aside my initial observations of the squalor of the “Children’s Village,” but it was startling. I knew funding had to be a constant problem, yet the grounds had a look of sloppy indifference completely out of step with the mission of the orphanage. A smattering of small, rough-hewn huts or cabins were scattered around, but there was no sign of a medical center or of schooling of any kind. There appeared to be no resources for teaching and few for amusement. The orphanage’s land grant of two hundred acres was large enough that no security walls were required, and the lightly forested terrain kept visibility local, giving a pleasant pastoral quality to the environment, if you ignored the people living in it. The orphanage residents sat or
played in the dry air amid the dust that seemed to cover every-thing.

We asked if we could meet Childers, but were told he had been back in America for some time, doing public relations. I had to wonder if the apparently lax condition of things around there was because in his absence the overall system had unspooled. I tried to imagine a child being “rehabilitated” there and couldn’t get a picture to come into focus.

Still, we had just arrived, and it would have been a bad idea to start walking around questioning why things looked so bleak. The orphanage was everything I expected it to be: an isolated place in a clear state of need. The children there struck me as reasonably open and friendly, given their backgrounds, but I think somehow my unconscious mind was already taking note of things I wouldn’t allow myself to openly consider. The message “you should have known better” began to tug at the edge of my awareness.

A desperate atmosphere pervaded the entire place. Nobody seemed to have enough of anything. But the younger kids were willing to engage with us after some initial hesitation, and I began to pass out the art supplies.

It was a measure of my failure to appreciate the level of desperation there that I soon noticed the glitter had all disappeared. It took a while to realize the kids apparently thought it was candy and ate it. Their desire for some sort of a treat was strong enough that they ignored the metallic taste of the stuff for the joy of eating something shiny.

It hadn’t even occurred to me to look out for that. And the message in it was clear: There was a huge disconnect between my enthusiasm to be of service and the lethal gravity of the situation in that place.

I tried to sense the staff’s compassion or the humanitarian concern that seemed inseparable from a job such as theirs, but if those
attitudes existed there I somehow missed them. I was completely unprepared for the level of fatalistic acceptance in that place.

Most of the young residents were escaped child soldiers or orphans created in raids by the LRA. This terrorist/criminal group is widely known for the kind of savagery that forms a working definition of raw psychosis, or as some would put it, of evil on a biblical scale. Those children were subjected to horrors that surpass all understanding, including being drugged into near oblivion and then, with a gun to their heads, forced to kill their own family members so there would be nobody to look for them. It was a systematic method of terrorizing an entire population. The dark purpose was to effectively stigmatize the captured children among their own communities and ruin their family base, traumatizing them so thoroughly that they never wanted to go home again. Shackles weren’t needed; the kids had nowhere left to go.

I knew of few places other than that orphanage that were making any serious attempt to reacquire and rehabilitate children who’d seen every source of hope snatched away. For most of these very young people, their grim situation was amplified by a drug regimen forced on them and sustained until addiction took over and drove them on its own. Getting away from the drugs was only the first step of their long recovery, if there was to be one at all.

After an awkward and confusing first day, we joined some of the student chaplains in their hut back at the compound during the single hour of electrical power provided for the night. They were fans of the TV series
24
and made it plain this was how the hour of electricity would be spent. It was so odd to see that very American program in this place, when the locations on the screen were as foreign to this audience as another planet.

I’ll never know what sort of headway Susan and I might have made at the orphanage. That night, in the stillness and darkness of that isolated place, automatic weapons fire abruptly broke out
all around us. Chaos exploded and bullets flew everywhere in the darkness. The explosions of gunfire were so loud the sound itself was painful. The armed men of the compound grabbed their weapons and began returning fire, creating an instant war zone.

Instinct took over. Susan and I pressed our bodies flat against the ground and crawled through the darkness to a hut farther away from the shooting. We lay there in stark terror while gunfire and screaming went on all around us. Somebody whispered that the attackers were from the Lord’s Resistance Army.

This meant we were under attack from fighters who were known to torture and kill their victims. The gunfire raged around us while the defending soldiers put up a stiff fight. We were unable to move. There was nothing to do but wait and hope the defenders were up to the job. If the LRA soldiers overran the place and took prisoners, they would undoubtedly consider women like Susan and me interlopers in their struggle. After all, we were there to aid an organization whose mission was to draw fighters away from their “army.” They would almost certainly want to set a public example in the way they killed us.

I am alive only because the attackers were either driven back or stole what they were after and departed. We escaped the gunfire by lying low, and learned many of the children ran off into the wilderness to escape being kidnapped again. At that time there was no way of knowing how many would be reacquired by the LRA or killed trying to run, or how many might live to return. The aftermath of the adrenaline overdose left me nauseated and shaky.

Welcome to Africa, Great and Heroic Saviors. What now?

It later turned out that the attackers didn’t seem committed to killing or torturing, but just fired into the air to scare people away and then raided the compound’s supplies—the local version of grocery shopping. They were successful in that no bodies were left behind, so they would have every reason to repeat the raid at will. It seemed plain that our capture was only a matter of time—after
all, we were just two schoolteachers with no combat training and no weapons. My first attempt at volunteer work in Africa turned out to be sadly brief.

Susan was able to contact the pilot of our puddle jumper and arranged for us to evacuate the next morning. It was completely disorienting to be retreating so soon, but our mission was to attempt to nurture and educate orphaned kids, not engage in combat with gangs of marauders. Even trained soldiers hate to go up against fighters who are drugged into fearlessness.

We gladly climbed into the tiny plane, whose size and condition didn’t trouble me nearly as much this time. It rattled and coughed its way into the air, carrying us away from the Lord’s Resistance Army and a problem just a tad larger than we expected. I didn’t see anything in the Childers orphanage that justified attempting to return to that place, and I had to ask myself what sort of help I would be providing to the orphans if I did. The departure was sudden and painful but the message in it was clear. Wherever my future happened to lie in Africa, it sure wasn’t there in South Sudan. But I had seen enough to know it was somewhere there in Africa. I could already feel the roots taking hold.

It wasn’t Erik’s stint as a conscript sergeant in the Swedish military back in the day that landed him in Africa in 2006. Although his military unit dealt with antisabotage and counterintelligence, teaching him things he still used in Africa, all that had no bearing on his decision to go. He had studied international law and politics for years and was fascinated with the twists and turns of legal arguments, but those things alone never would have taken him so far from home. His commitment to work in places like Kenya and Somalia was cemented by his work at the Swedish Migration Board in the position of asylum officer in the four years just before his move to Africa.

The job kept him face to face with asylum applicants from the Horn of Africa region, one after another. Many showed up desperate to pour out their stories of repression in their far-off homeland, often describing a list of lethal dangers menacing them if they were forced to return.

He ran across a few fakers from time to time, knowing every public resource will have its problems of abuse. But he didn’t believe the average human being could convincingly fake such stories when the audience is someone who listens to them every day. A person develops the unhappy skill of spotting liars by listening
to so many tales of organized state psychosis. Erik soon came to believe that the daily experience of working in this atmosphere will either teach you something important and vital about the human experience or turn your heart to stone.

The trade-off for the knowledge of such terrible things was that the job changed him forever. He found that a few simple but powerful messages had become riveted into his worldview, chiefly the conviction that any level of fraud within the system paled against the sheer human misery facing many of those people. More than anything else, it’s his memories of them that brought him to such a faraway place—not just their stories, but the sense of truth they radiated while they spoke.

He met with asylum seekers two days each week, listening to a litany of horror stories. His division was sometimes able to prevent people from being returned to troubled regions, but after years of listening to stories of misery, the root problems behind them became his prime concern.

His friends tolerated that in him and accepted his aversion to sugarcoating the truth, but it wasn’t always appreciated around the office. The impact of those years as an asylum officer had left him impatient with bureaucracy and hungry to get involved on a more direct and local level.

By the time he arrived in Africa, he was emotionally finished with life in Sweden, comfortable as it was, and with the familiarities of his homeland. That plodding line of asylum applicants, combined with the safe predictability of life, driving him to seek the unpredictability that was the essence of his new position at a major Swedish NGO, working in the semiautonomous state of Puntland in northeast Somalia. After a long series of interviews he convinced their hiring committee he was a good fit as their new legal and human rights program manager. This was a position formerly filled by an experienced man in his fifties, so Erik felt a healthy level of anxiety about doing a worthy job. It required
negotiating with governmental heads throughout the region, and it could put him across from them in tense negotiations over human rights reforms in the judiciary sector, or make it necessary to poke around in the worst prisons imaginable and stare into the faces of the walking cadavers held there.

It was the right time in his life to make this journey. A few months earlier, his fiancée back home had called off their planned wedding. He wasn’t happy about it but had to admit she might have done right by both of them—trooping around Africa was never going to be her cup of tea.

This made it a lot easier to put himself through all the necessary steps before making the journey to Africa. Once his life there actually began, he was relieved to be without the sort of strong emotional ties that would have put up distractions in the new job.

As for family back at home, they weren’t thrilled with his choice of assignment, but nobody seriously questioned his motives. He was grateful for that. Instead they promised to visit as soon as possible and see his new hometown of Nairobi, Kenya, for themselves.

He was struck by how good it felt to be alone, in terms of not causing anyone at home to worry. It seemed obvious that it would be completely unreasonable to expect to find a woman who could understand what he was doing and accept his need to be in that place.

When it came to personal time, it was all too clear that work like his was destined to be an individual sport.

Jessica:

My truncated stay at the Childers orphanage in South Sudan was like being awakened by a plunge into freezing water. My senses had never been so overwhelmed. The experience didn’t change my overall goals, but it completely realigned my approach. I pulled back to work out a new strategy designed to actually allow me to be of service while also avoiding a pointless death there.