In collaboration with PASSIONS, VOICE OF ASIA is proud to present timeless articles from the archives, reproduced digitally for your reading pleasure. Originally published in PASSIONS Volume 47 in 2013, we present this story on Sam Childers, a man who took up arms – literally – to free children from a tyrant halfway across the world.
By some he has been accused of being a bible-toting mass murderer, but the truth is vastly different, though no less sensational. A man who put himself into near financial ruin to rescue children in the war-torn regions of Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda, Childers is a humanitarian like no other – risking life and limb to venture into conflict hot-zones to help the children of East Africa. His efforts have renewed the faith of thousands, and continue to give hope to thousands more that angels do in fact exist, and sometimes, happen to walk among us.
Picture this: A lone child standing in the midst of the sunbaked Ugandan desert, the torn and bloodied limbs of his compatriots scattered about him. Unseeing eyes stare into his own, and he watches as his brother’s life bleeds out onto the desert floor. His frame is an emaciated canvas of skin strung tightly over bones that jut out at painful angles. His eyes are soulless pits in his cadaverous face, etched with an agony he has become numb to, yet one he is forced to relive each day through the dying screams of his people.
The sounds of battle rage around him as bullets ricochet through the torpid air with deadly intent. The heat sears his lungs, and he reminds himself that he needs more than breath to survive. His fate is as simple as it is inevitable: kill or be killed. Slowly, he raises the machine gun slung around his skeletal form and takes aim.
The Atrocities Of War
With a shocking 2.5 million succumbing to gruesome and violent death in Sudan during a civil war spanning more than two decades, The Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) continues to find new outlets for degradation and atrocity. Led by the notorious African warlord Joseph Kony, this rebel paramilitary group spreads its reign of terror in Uganda and Sudan, and has been decreed a terrorist faction by the US State Department.
As the source of Africa’s longest-running armed conflict, Kony and the LRA emerged from the Holy Spirit Movement (HSM) which was the brainchild of one Alice Auma, a woman belonging to the Acholi tribe in Northern Uganda who claimed herself to be the medium of the Lakwena spirit – thought to be a manifestation of the Christian Holy Spirit. The HSM sought to oppose Yoweri Museveri’s gaining of the Ugandan presidency in 1986, and later overthrow his rule and liberate the north from government oppression through forging alliances with rebel militia groups. However, due to a lack of interregional support, the HSM’s efforts met with limited success and led to Auma being exiled.
A distant relative of Auma, Kony assumed leadership of the group and soon after changed its name to the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Facing similar problems as his predecessor in terms of regional support and numbers, he began abducting children from neighbouring towns and villages to fill the ranks of his army. Together, Kony and the LRA have been deemed responsible for the abduction of more than 30,000 children in Northern Uganda, and the murder of tens of thousands more.
From the outset, Kony’s reign was steeped in bloodshed, and he unhesitantly inflicted extreme brutality on all who had the misfortune to cross his path. He took particular pleasure in forcing children to murder their parents using machetes or blunt instruments while he and his officers watched. Girls were abducted for the purpose of becoming sex-slaves, and were violently raped if they resisted. At the height of the atrocities, children began to ‘night commute’, walking miles from their homes each evening to the city centres where they would sleep in churches, schools and bus depots to avoid being kidnapped by the LRA.
Answering The Call
Thousands of miles away in a town nestled in the Pennsylvanian hills, a renegade biker named Sam Childers was turning his life around. The son of honest, hard-working Christians, he had begun to display rebellious tendencies at a young age and by his early teens, was regularly getting into fist fights, pushing hard drugs and having liaisons with married women. A high-school dropout, Childers soon joined the ranks of the Hells Angels, a notorious biker gang based in Florida, involved in violent bar-room brawls, drug and weapon possession, and murder. His reputation in local crime circles was cemented when he later became an armed guard for a group of drug dealers.
His marriage in 1982 to Lynn, a stripper, was the turning point for Childers to get his life back on track. Years of hard living had taken their toll and he began to question the choices he had made. To distance himself from violence and crime, Childers and his wife moved back to Pennsylvania where he found a job working in construction, and despite a persistent drug and alcohol habit, began to turn his life around.
While Childers worked at building a future for himself and Lynn in the first honest job of his life, his wife turned her attention to God and the church. She beseeched her husband to do the same, and despite his initial misgivings, Childers’ love for his wife prevailed and he began to re-establish his relationship with the faith he had forsaken. After accepting Jesus into his life in 1992, his confidence in the power of Christ was cemented, with the birth of a daughter soon after and the starting of his own construction business.
All For The Children
6 years later and at the behest of his church pastor, he journeyed with a group of missionaries to Africa where the Second Sudanese War was at its peak. Arriving at the village of Yei in Southern Sudan, Childers devoted his time to helping repair homes damaged by the conflict. During this time, he met medical aid teams sent to assist people subjected to the trauma of war, those suffering grievous landmine-inflicted injuries as well as women and children brutally disfigured by the LRA.
Walking through the African bush one evening, Childers came across the body of a child, mangled beyond recognition by a single misstep on a landmine. Cradling the broken, battered body in his arms, he sank to his knees and vowed to God that he would devote his life to relieving the plight of the African people.
It was also during this time that Childers came into direct contact with the LRA and learned that children who were not much older than his daughter were being abducted and forced into becoming soldiers and prostitutes. Appalled by the lack of government and international humanitarian effort to safeguard the rights of the abused and downtrodden, Childers decided to make it his personal mission to bring justice to all those subjected to the LRA’s reign of terror.
Visiting the war-torn regions of Sudan a few months later after his return from the US, Childers also ventured to Boma and further north to the Ugandan border where the conflict had escalated to an alarming degree. Upon passing through the village of Nimule in Uganda, he experienced an epiphany to build an orphanage in the village.
His plans were initially met with resistance by the locals as they questioned the wisdom of building a safe haven for children in the middle of a conflict-plagued war-zone – one in which the LRA were especially active. However, adamant at following divine guidance, Childers returned again to the US where he liquidated his construction business and took out a mortgage on his house – accumulating enough funds to commence his fulfilment of God’s word.
Missionary Or Mercenary?
Upon his return to Nimule, Childers purchased 40 acres of land from the Ugandan government and commenced construction of the orphanage – the Angels of East Africa Children’s Village. Financial difficulties at home not withstanding, he devoted all his resources to the building of the orphanage and often patrolled the grounds at night, with a bible in one hand and an AK47 in the other. It was during this time also that Childers enlisted the support of the Sudanese and Ugandan governments as well as the services of soldiers from the Sudan People’s Liberation Army (SPLA) – a body whose raison d’etré is to restore the sovereignty and territorial integrity of all African states.
Childers and his team ventured deep into the African bush, to areas where the LRA were known to inhabit, engaging large numbers of enemy soldiers in armed combat. With the SPLA’s support, he front-lined armed rescue missions into the heart of enemy territory, killing LRA officials and spiriting children and adults away to safety. It is precisely this crusading fervour that earned this courageous man the nickname ‘Machine Gun Preacher’ – a Christian mercenary who kills in the name of protecting the innocent.
In the past 12 years, Childers has served as protector to all those victimised by Kony and his associates. More than 700 children have been reunited with their families thanks to his unwavering effort, and today, more than 300 children orphaned by the LRA call the safe-house in Nimule their home. In addition, more than 1,000 others have been sheltered, fed and cared for by Childers’ team of Sudanese war-orphans and widows.
Childers’ work continues to bring light to the lives of those tarnished by the ravages of war. Though lambasted by critics for using violence in his quest to bring justice to the children of Southern Sudan and Northern Uganda, he remains steadfast in his mission. The Angels of East Africa continues to dedicate itself to the rescue and rehabilitation of children in these war-torn regions – the first humanitarian initiative of its kind set right in the heart of a conflict zone. Though Childers’ efforts have often been described as a god-sent miracle, the reality is in fact more akin to a simple truth: it only takes one man’s courage to make a difference.
